Uppsala University Psychosocial Care Programme: U-CARE

Since not so long I am connected to “the Uppsala University Psychosocial Care Programme: U-CARE” as a member of an advisory group for the programme (programberedning). 

U-CARE is one of the Swedish government’s strategic research programmes and started in 2010. U-CARE studies how people with physical illnesses and their families are affected psychosocially, and what help they need to deal with various psychological problems. U-care are developing self-help programs for these disorders. They are also working to develop and continuously improve an Internet platform (U-CARE portal) through which it is possible to offer and study the effect of psychosocial support and psychological treatment.

You can find a very informing YouTube film about U-care here: https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/video/embed/4392

A few weeks ago Helena Grönqvist visited our department to present their work with U-care and the how the programme has developed. You can find the seminar at the seminar series on “Current Challenges in Biomed-IT”

 

 

In this seminar Helena Grönqvist talks about that they forgot to include the users in a structured way when developing the U-care platform and that they ran into problems due to this mistake. She also talked of the problems they encountered using Scrum and Agile.

(Not including the users is really a very common mistake, and I have written a few papers on user are included in Scrum projects (You find some of them here at Reserach Gate). Such a common mistake!)

They have now changed their way of developing the U-care portal so they now have a cyclical process where the users are included and a part of the development.

Some of the challenges that U-care face in the future, according to Helena Grönqvist, are:

  • New technology changes what users want. Do they need to have the portal avaliable on different platforms?
  • Legislation and for example the professors’ privelege is a problem since they want U-care knowledge to be open access.
  • Implementation problems: It takes 17 years until their innovation is implemented in health care. How can we make things move faster?

I am really looking forward to continuing this work and I will keep you updated on the work. 🙂