Municipality Vingåker develops a solution to tackle loneliness and isolation
For the past few years, Municipality Vingåker has been developing the concept of smart villages. The idea centers around building services that enable people to live in rural areas by taking care of, and utilizing, the resources available. As the municipality has been exploring ways to create long-term value for each of its departments, it’s been focusing on using Microsoft Teams to digitally transform elderly care. Its innovative approach to customizing the tools it already uses has helped to bring to life its mission: to not only provide intelligent services to its citizens, but to also improve their quality of life.
“Our main focus is to bring better, smarter services to our citizens and find ways to work with the limited resources we have. And to do this, we need a digital-first strategy.”
Regina Westas Stedt, Strategist and Broadband Coordinator at Municipality Vingåker, is explaining the aim behind digitalizing the public sector in the small Swedish village. Although the rural area has modest resources, it is known for its innovative approach to solving problems within the local community it serves. One such challenge it has faced in recent times, is the ever-growing cost of elderly care.
“As people are living longer, more and more of our elderly citizens have been entering the care system, which can often be costly for the taxpayer,” Westas Stedt continues. “When we discovered that loneliness is a contributing factor to health deterioration, we knew it was vital that we find a solution to improve the quality of life for our elderly community, which might in turn delay them entering the care system.”
The municipality already used a suite of cloud-based technologies, laying the foundation for the development of a new interface to enable better communication, inclusion and service management. Through its initiative, the municipality has become the first in Sweden to create a purpose-built solution based on Microsoft Teams to help tackle loneliness and isolation – a solution that has the potential to transform not only elderly care, but many of its other public sector services, too.
A rural village sets its sights on improving connectivity
The municipality, located in southeast Sweden, is home to six villages and around 9,000 citizens, of which 4,500 of them live in the largest village, Vingåker. Delivering services throughout the municipality often proves difficult owing to the fact that citizens do not live close to each other. This has driven the municipality to find ways to digitalize its services and operations where possible.
“In 2014, we began the process of becoming a ‘smart village’”, says Dan Ulf, Strategist for Municipality Vingåker’s IT department. “Using technology as a facilitator, we have been working to become more intelligent on a relatively low budget. We implemented Microsoft 365 with Microsoft Teams to enable things like flexible working and improved connectivity and collaboration, particularly within political departments and schools.”
Having established that foundation, the municipality set about interviewing its organizations to try to understand what challenges they faced and devise ways to remedy them. “When it came to social care services,” Ulf explains, “it was clear there was a big problem. As people are living longer, more people are entering the care system which comes at a high cost to the municipality. Our approach was to explore how we could use digitalization to help the elderly stay healthier for longer and delay their entry into care homes.”
Several Swedish studies noted that loneliness and isolation – a common experience amongst the older population – accelerated health deterioration, causing people to end up in social care much earlier. So the municipality began to look at ways they could tackle the problem of loneliness, utilizing the Microsoft technologies that they already had at their disposal.
Reimagining a struggling care service
“With this initiative, we had two main aims: making elderly care more efficient and cost-effective, and improving the quality of life for this demographic,” says Westas Stedt. “This entailed creating that vital feeling of connection, but with a reduction in care visits.”
To do this, the municipality worked with Microsoft partner, Altitude 365 + Uclarity, to develop a customized version of Microsoft Teams that the elderly could use on tablets. Using Microsoft Power Apps, they built a simplified interface with the same capabilities as Microsoft Teams.
Although this project was in the pipeline for some time, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it made the isolation of the elderly more pointed, further solidifying how necessary this project was. So, in 2020, the municipality piloted the technology to a group of 10 people.
“One challenge we initially faced,” admits Westas Stedt, “was encouraging the elderly to feel safe using the technology as they’re typically a target of cybercrime. Microsoft’s security features were a huge bonus for us. Aside from this, we wanted elderly people to feel confident using the technology as this age group can sometimes feel afraid of digitalisation. But to our surprise, the participants of the pilot were really enthusiastic.”
The pilot, which the municipality named ‘The Bubble’, enabled elderly people to chat with each other in meetings hosted digitally by the public library, which provides support to citizens and elderly people to help them become more familiar with digital technologies. Now, the healthcare team is able to interact with the elderly via these digital channels, without them needing to meet in real life. This reduces the number of visits that healthcare professionals have to make so they can focus their time on giving quality care to those who need it most. The feelings of loneliness and isolation were also reduced as the elderly were able to participate in local events and cultural activities which were programmed into their daily agendas.
Altitude 365 + Uclarity also helped the municipality to collect vital data from the pilot to get insights for future improvements and to inspire new innovations. “From the data and feedback we collected from The Bubble initiative, it was clear that we’d discovered a way to positively impact our elderly community and support social care by reimaging the technology we were already using – it was a great success.”
The solution’s capabilities permeate the whole public sector
For the elderly, the impact of the initiative was clear. It created a sense of community which helped to reduce the feelings of loneliness and isolation. The municipality believe that this improved quality of life will have a real impact on peoples’ health over time.
“It’s been hugely beneficial for the municipality too,” says Westas Stedt. “We know that if we can delay the elderly entering social care, in the long-term, we can dramatically reduce costs, potentially saving millions of Krona. This means that as we improve productivity and streamline service management, we can spread our resources to other public sector departments that need it to provide intelligent services to our citizens.”
Since the pilot, the municipality has applied for funding to be able to offer the service to more people and develop the technology further. It is now preparing to launch the second phase of the scheme which will see 30 people offered the opportunity to take part.
There is an exciting future ahead for Municipality Vingåker. “As the technology continues to advance, we are looking into ways to develop it further,” says Ulf. “For example, with our elderly care service, we’d like to introduce a booking system which would enable relatives to schedule meetings. We also want to explore how health and social care can monitor peoples’ progress, improve communications and create more quality time with citizens.”
But the benefits of this technology go beyond elderly care. “Now that we have a suite of Microsoft technology as a foundation,” says Ulf, “we are building a whole ecosystem where there’s always the possibility to customize applications and tools to address the varying needs of the different organizations within the municipality. We’ve discovered that this technology can be reworked and applied to other situations such as facilitating communication for those who are isolating due to sickness or other health reasons and helping organizations reach people who are unable to travel.”
The fact that the municipality consists of vast rural areas no longer feels like the immense challenge to the public sector that it once did. Microsoft technologies has enabled the municipality to become more efficient, flexible, accessible and inclusive. They now have the confidence and capability to solve problems and bring ideas to life without incurring a huge cost.
Municipality Vingåker’s innovations have the potential to impact Sweden’s public sector on a much larger scale. They have met with over 30 Swedish municipalities to discuss the benefits that digitalisation can bring to society and share their philosophy of making resources go further by utilizing the technology available to them in the Microsoft suite.
“With these new digital capabilities, we can develop services in ways that were not possible a decade ago. What’s most important to us, is that we have raised not only the quality of our services, but the quality of life for our citizens.”
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