What is SPROCKET doing?

Systems and Process Redesign and Optimisation at Childhood Key Events and Transitions (SPROCKET)

The SPROCKET Innovation Hub will harness the experiences and thoughts of children and young people (CYP) and families as well as explore new ideas to improve the delivery of services. It will focus on service delivery during key transition points for CYP and families, for the most underserved communities.

The project will begin with an 18-month development phase in 2023/2024, where we will design the Hub with CYP & families.

An "Easy Read" introduction to SPROCKET is also available

The Hub's overall vision

To improve the lives of children with complex health needs, particularly those in underserved communities .

“Caring for a child with complex health needs affects every aspect of life: work, school, homes, finances, our family relationships, our health, our quality of life. We rearrange our lives around appointments, drop everything when they go into hospital, spend hours advocating for our child with professionals, and in the evenings we catch up on endless paperwork. Wouldn’t it be nice if the system was built to help our families thrive, rather than set us up to fail?”

– Parent co-applicant

Children and young people (CYP) are particularly at risk of being poorly served at certain transitions and key events, e.g., diagnosis, transition to education, moving home or transition to adult services. This risk is also affected by factors such as poverty, poor housing or access to transport.

What the full SPROCKET Hub will do in the future

SPROCKET will focus on improving services at key transitions for the most underserved communities. The hub will be a collaborative effort across academia, CYP and families, councils, schools, charities, health and social care and funding bodies.

Together we will:

Estimate the time and money spent by families interacting with different services.
Work in partnership with CYP, families and services to design better system delivery, and improve how service quality is defined and monitored.
Test new ideas with partner services (especially health and social care, education).

Development phase (now)

Development phase aim: To use engagement, co-production and analysis to lay the groundwork for SPROCKET’s success.

We will work with CYP, families and services to:

Choose key transitions and patient populations.

Expand our team across academia, services, funders, charities and families.
Co-develop how the full Hub will engage with CYP and families, especially those in more deprived communities.
Draw out how services fit together.
Highlight which solutions to evaluate in the full Hub.

Geography

SPROCKET spans the Northeast London, North Central London and Mid and South Essex footprint of UCLPartners (UCLP) containing a 5.2 million population that is ethnically and socially diverse, inner city, urban and rural. East London includes two of the ten most deprived authorities in England (24) and our communities have high rates of migrant GP registrations (25).

The diversity of these populations will help with spread to other locations and show the influence of the housing, social care and community context. Wide regions allows us to test and learn about putting interventions in place where the context, access and availability may differ.  

Funding

Funding for the developmental phase of SPROCKET was provided by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) (Project ID: NIHR156988) in partnership with UK Research and Innovation Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), as part of their Systems Engineering Innovation hubs for Multiple long-term Conditions (SEISMIC) programme.

The SEISMIC programme aims to support teams to develop innovative approaches to understand how to improve the design of health and care services in order to better take a patient-centred, whole person approach to the treatment and care of people with multiple long-term conditions. 