Life at Care City as an LIS intern

From accidents in a Waitrose lorry to Human Learning Systems and Miro boards, Sarah reflects on her first week at Care City.

I have just come to the end of my first week as an LIS intern at Care City. I am very lucky, coming from the London Interdisciplinary School to be brokered an internship each summer and was overjoyed to discover that this year I had been placed with Care City for five weeks. 

My first week has not disappointed. Already, I have been part of a thought provoking reflective learning session, got to grips with unwieldy Miro boards and systems diagrams, realised I’m not the only person who loves music made by nuns, and engineered a photo-op featuring my cat with the Care City website (you’re welcome Rachel!). What a week it has been! 

But let’s go back to the beginning. The first thing I was tasked with was filling out my PUG (Personal User Guide – I’m not at all surprised that the Care City team have found a way to name these guides after a dog. They are animal obsessed!) to help other members of the team to work with me by letting them know how I work best and what sorts of things I may want some support with. 

I wrote about my love for the pomodoro method, wanting to see the impact of my work, and preferring to take important calls in the morning. However, I wasn’t expecting to also reveal that my most embarrassing moment at work has been getting a job as a Waitrose delivery driver during the pandemic and perhaps taking their slogan ‘bringing our store to your door’ a little too literally when I ended up in the side of some poor couple’s garage.. To the relief of all (especially me!) no van driving skills are required for this role. Besides, this was clearly engineered from Care City’s perspective to gather some fodder for teasing me on my first day!

Jokes aside, it was great to have the opportunity to reflect upon how I best work at the start of this process and shows just how much the team cares about getting the best out of everyone who comes to work here. 

But what about the actual work?! Well…

For the next five weeks I’ve been placed with the ‘Connect’ project, which is a trial in relational working to tackle the social isolation faced by many people when they are discharged from hospital without a resilient support network. Instead of the traditional service based approach, in which residents access predetermined activities and assistance, this model focuses on facilitating authentic relationships and bringing whatever support residents feel they need around them so they gain confidence and independence. I will specifically be looking at how to best bring the lived experiences of B&D residents into the heart of this Connect project as it starts to be rolled out in the community. 

Alongside my background as a frankly dangerous delivery van driver and as an interdisciplinary student at LIS, I have also worked previously as a healthcare assistant in a district nursing team, and continue to work now in an acute hospital alongside my studies.

Already I have lots of ideas about how we might go about this, from multimedia ‘cultural probes’, to creating a lived experience advisory board. Next week, I’m starting the process of learning from residents of B&D themselves to shape what my work over the next few weeks could look like. 

It has been a pleasure to start to get to grips with this project this week. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that so much of what I have been learning about at university has come in useful here already and by how much autonomy I’ve been given over my work. This week, I’ve particularly been enjoying applying some of my systems and design thinking knowledge. I have learnt about ‘Human Learning Systems’, the conceptual framework (created by Toby Lowe) that is underpinning the Connect project, and reflecting on the idea of creating public services that are ‘bespoke by default’.

Something that’s stuck out to me this week has been the emphasis on learning from each other at every stage. I’ve been blown away by the commitment to kindness and reflection shown by everyone at Care City and the other organisations that are working on the Connect project. Everyone has been so generous with their time in getting to know me, and I’ve been left excited to see where the next four weeks take me. 

That’s the wrap for this week!