Helsedirektoratet
Holistic public services for severely ill children
Experimentation as a method to tackle a wicked problem

Alvorlig Sykt Barn – barn og unge med behov for sammensatte tjenester (Severely ill child – children and adolescents with a need for complex services) is one of seven life events defined in the national Norwegian digitalisation strategy, where the development of seamless services is prioritised. The Norwegian Directorate of Health is coordinating the development of holistic and seamless public services for children with complex needs and their families. We have helped them identify why challenges occur, the relation between them and explored new ways of working to find solutions.

The challenge
A need for seamless and tailored support
Families and their children with needs for complex services – often related to a combination of physical, psychological, and cognitive – experience significant difficulties receiving adequate support. Lack of coordination between sectors and public services providers results in families spending an average of 19 hours per week, coordinating the services. The project Alvorlig sykt barn (Severely ill child) aims to understand how and where problems occur and how they relate to each other, so we can find a way to offer families seamless, tailored, and reliable support across sectors.

“The public sector delivers some of the most important services in our lives. Many dedicated and skilled public servants work hard to help people, so it was with great humility that we approached this task.”

Sigrun Vik
Head of Health & Welfare, Oslo



The outcome
Experimentation and visualisation to map the challenges
Innovation in the public sector is complex, with numerous stakeholders at all levels of decision-making. We approached the problem through to get past the initial threshold of fear of making mistakes. By designing and staging different scenarios, we used experimentation as a method to learn and gather new and deeper insights about the challenges. Staged scenarios offered a safe environment where we removed the real or imagined barriers of processes, protocols, and silos between departments.
We summarised, visualised, and prioritised the existing challenges to make them clear and comprehensible. This, combined with the experimental approach of testing scenarios and solutions for collaboration, allowed us to identify no less than 45 concrete suggestions for projects that together can help create seamless and adequate support for the children and their families.

“A lot of it was about daring to start somewhere. To dare to do things differently. The experiments gave us new tools that we have started using – they work really well!”
Sophie Bouffard
Flekkefjord Municipality

Delivered value
A clear overview and the possibility of tracking and measuring results
The overview will facilitate staying on track when working on individual projects and enables tracking and measuring results, and facilitates the prioritisation of interventions. It's crucial to work on several parallel to keep the focus where it should be – on the families.
The Norwegian Directorate of Health has already started with the first of the 45 suggested interventions –"Rett på." This sub-project aims to make information about children's and young's rights more easily accessible. The Directorate of Health received 57 million NOK in June 2022 to improve access to information for families and their children and continue the effort within the life event.
Get in touch
Would you like to to know more about this?
Reach out to the team - we're happy to answer questions, receive feedback or discuss the topic.

Cathrine Einarsson
Senior Service Designer, Oslo

Anders Kunz
Agency Director Norway, Oslo