Nishtha Aggarwal

Our Brief:

This project has been a journey of unfolding the experiences of cancer patients/survivors and healthcare professionals to navigate through complex systems to deliver patient-centred design.

The Challenge:

Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer affects not just the body, but also the mind and spirit. It is important to take care of the holistic well-being of the patient. The conventional treatment focuses on treating the illness in the physical body and it comes with lots of severe side effects so much so that sometimes patients discontinue their treatment. 

The Integrative care cancer approach helps manage these severe side effects to aid cancer patients continue with their treatment for faster recovery.

Top Insights: 

1. Nutrition is an integral part of the Integrative care approach being the basic need and fuel for your body. A balanced nutritious diet boosts immunity and heals the mind, body & soul to recover from the side effects of treatment.

2. There is limited time and access to resources. Nutrition is expensive and doctors don’t always have a lot of time and are indifferent towards discussing other care options. This results in irrevocably late advice and also self-advocacy by patients.

3. There’s a dangerous amount of information available at a click on Dr Google and yet there's a lack of streamlined information for the patients and their nutrition.

4. The emotional trauma associated while approaching nutritional care is massive and due to the severe side effects that come with cancer treatment there is a disconnection in their relationship with food.

Service Proposition: 

Introducing Dear Diet, a nutrition Hand holder for Colorectal Cancer patients. It is a nutritional data-driven platform that gives streamlined information and personalized recommendations, allowing emotional and experiential mapping associated with food.

This will help create awareness at an early diagnosis stage by encouraging healthy and sustainable eating habits for patients. In addition, it will help them recognise their personal nutrition patterns helping them re-establish their relationship with food.

Impact:

Dear Diet hugely impacts the following stakeholders:

1. Cancer Patients: provides affordable nutrition advice minimizing the overwhelming anxiety and severe side effects throughout the treatment. It gives back their lost control, through symptom and pattern tracking helping them understand their individual nutrition needs.

2. Doctors, Nutritionists and Integrative Cancer Carers: help them dedicate more time to specific cases, enhance audience connection, and facilitate integrative care advocacy, fostering a healthy doctor-patient relationship so doctors can focus on treating cancer.

3. Medical Institutions & Research Centres: the collected data has the potential to aid future research and correlate food choices with clinical outcomes for all cancer types not just individually but also culturally. Medical professionals can access this data as electronic health records, which can be translated into reports using AI, facilitating a deeper understanding of each case's specificity.

Please feel free to reach out for more

INTRODUCTION

In July 2022, the British Parliament passed a bill creating a new secure school, Oasis Restore, for youth offenders between the ages of 16 and 19. The school, set to open in the winter of 2023 in Medway, Kent, will employ a team from Oasis Community Learning, a charitable organisation that educates children at risk of expulsion.

Oasis Restore will utilise the principles of Restorative Justice, which focuses on addressing the needs of both victims and offenders through meetings and dialogue, instead of a traditional retributive approach. However, the school faces the challenge of gaining students’ trust who may arrive with a negative attitude towards authority. Though Oasis Restore already plans on giving students group therapy and has in-house psychologists, we believe the needs and traumas of the incoming children are more complex than Oasis has currently prepared for.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

How might we help the students have a consistent, healthy relationship with a positive model figure that is nurtured throughout their time in the secure school?

NEW ROLE - SHARED EXPERIENCE MENTOR

The Shared Experience Mentor (SEM) program is designed to provide each child with a dedicated and trustworthy adult role model committed to supporting and advocating for them. SEMs will be responsible for a small group of students, eating meals with them and meeting each of them personally once a week, and will work closely with their teachers to ensure that each child's unique needs are met. They will have access to each child's sensory profile and previous records, and will use this information to help the teacher tailor lesson plans and activities to the child's needs.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Many children who come to Oasis have experienced significant trauma, such as neglect or abuse, and may have difficulty trusting adults and authority figures. The Shared Experience Mentor (SEM) plays a crucial role in helping these children feel safe and supported as they adjust to their new surroundings.

The SEM will work closely with each child to provide the individualised attention and care they may not have received in their families. Through building trust and connecting, the SEM will help the child work through past traumas and feel more secure in their new environment. The SEM will provide a safe haven of support.

SIGNIFICANCE

The SEM is a compassionate link, bringing together Oasis's caring efforts and the child's openness to growth.

ARTEFACTS

Download the pdf to see more.

IMPACT

We are not just introducing a new role, we are changing the organisational dynamics of Oasis. Because the SEM will understand the child, the other staff can leverage this understanding and provide better support. By working together, the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. In the future, we envision a whole network of people who leave the secure school and come together to form one body.

The mission of ACE is to Achieve Compliance and Engagement for people on probation. We are working within the probation system. Probation is when an offender is released from prison and is subject to a period of good behaviour under supervision which represents 50% of their sentence. During this time, they can be recalled if they fail to abide by their licence conditions or alternativel they can complete their probation.

Compass, a multi-stakeholder digital platform for Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Services and associates in the community, that maps together all rehabilitation programmes. Compass empowers frontline prison, probation and community-based practitioners to spend more time doing what they signed up for -  making a difference.

For People on probation, Compass can improve digital literacy and provide motivation, agency, support and knowledge. 

Service providers can be seen, learn from others, collaborate on projects and scale their initiatives.

And for the Ministry of Justice, can make better decisions and provide funding where most needed, through data collection and categorization which enable them to identify service area gaps and surpluses.

Watch the video to know more. Please feel free to reach out for more information on the project.