Center for Diabetes and Heart Disease, City of Copenhagen

Challenge 

The Center for Diabetes and Heart Disease is the only municipal center in Denmark specializing in the prevention and rehabilitation of diabetes and heart disease. The employees' diverse health professional skills and ability to bring them into play in the task solution contribute daily to creating impactful results for Copenhagen residents and the Centre's partners.

In the spring of 2023, the centre's management decided to give extra impetus to the realisation of Action Plan 2022-2025 and the four central tracks 1. Cross-cutting coherence, 2. Equality in health, 3. Mental health and 4. A practice-oriented knowledge center.

Through a focused period of 100 days with an experimental and action-oriented approach, all employees worked to find new ways and solutions to the following challenges.

• How do we ensure that time is spent on the core task and that citizens do not experience unequal and long waiting times?

• How do we work focused on health inequality through the development of the person-centered approach?

• How do we develop digital offers for citizens and ensure that we reach all audiences — including those who are challenged on their mobility.

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Solution 

All employees were organized into multidisciplinary sprint teams, where development and operations personnel have experimented over 100 days to find solutions to the challenges of interacting with citizens and partners. Along the way, the teams have been guided through workshops and sparring sessions, as well as the center's management has developed their management practices through sparring on leading the sprint course. In the process, the leadership group has sharpened their strategic narrative and professional approach, which has strengthened communication about the Centre's ambitions both internally and externally.

Resonance has provided a toolbox for both employees and management, which has formed the framework of progress in the process.

Results 

The following results have been obtained:

• Citizens feel that they can get there faster. There is a greater degree of flexibility in making new appointments, as the center's employees have found solutions for more efficient calendar management. Searching for first available time, changing and expanding call blocks and testing new procedure for rebooking as well as closing voicemail have led to the result.

• The Center has implemented multidisciplinary citizens' conferences (ISBARR as a method), where citizen cases are discussed, so that contact persons get concrete sparring on the plan and process and thereby ensure differentiation in meeting with citizens.

• The Centre has generally professionalised an interdisciplinary approach to citizens through the development of much greater knowledge of each other as professional groups

• More citizens receive digital offers through Teams, but now increasingly also through VDX, where minutes are accumulated immediately.

• A digital roadmap has been developed that is suitable for future work with digital solutions

• A stronger multidisciplinary culture of cooperation has been developed at the centre

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Selected citations

“Us and those between heart and diabetes don't exist so much anymore.”

“The process has given rise to new sprints with the same structure and method — now in Tingbjerg in the heart and lung area”

“As heads of departments, we have become more in character together”

“As Centre Manager, I have been given more time for cross-cutting cooperation in SUF and external partnerships”

“Employees seek professional sparring and use each other across a lot more”

“I saw that we had untapped potential among our employees. By leaving employees free to find solutions within a given framework, solutions were offered that are more citizen-friendly and relevant and easier to implement. It is a great pleasure as Center Manager to experience this and the sprint method is now part of our practice when we make strategic development”