The Healthier Working Lives (HWL) project assessed the challenges and opportunities for the over-50s care workforce. The project aimed to identify ways to promote healthier working lives and ageing for older care workers – developing their careers, enhancing user continuity and promoting everyone’s wellbeing.

Key dimensions of the care sector are in crisis and it has never been more crucial to encourage professional, respected and confident workers along with workforce planning and support. Critically, from its inception the HWL programme aimed to transform aspects of the care sector though co-production with care workers. The ambition was to stimulate intrapreneurship to generate innovative products and services that have impact at scale and leave a legacy of the programme that can be sustained well beyond the lifetime of this work.

A key output of the Design Informatics team working on the programme was The Ripple Framework, which was developed with staff from partnering care homes and facilities. The Ripple Framework is a dynamic and adaptable circular diagram encompassing 30 distinct research methods, and is intended to support those engaged in co-design and co-production activities to explore how methods might fit into their service (re)design processes.