Pungo – Joy: Enabling social prescribers to track the mental wellbeing of the elderly

The Challenge 

Build a website to track the mental wellbeing of the elderly and suggest activities and services to help

Leading charities and healthcare professionals are responsible for calling on elderly people to check up on their mental health and to monitor their involvement with the local community. If there are any concerns over their wellbeing, social prescribers would suggest services and activities to reduce loneliness and other issues.

With many charities, this process is often still done manually, which means using the data for tracking purposes can be challenging.

Pungo, a tech for good company that focuses on promoting wellbeing and reducing loneliness, reached out to Softwire to help them build a webpage for Joy, their project aimed to digitise the monitoring and referral activity of social prescribers in the UK.

Our Solution

We built a website for social prescribers to track the wellbeing of the elderly, employing a survey-based framework

As this website would be used by healthcare workers and social prescribers to track the wellbeing of many elderly people, we needed to build a system that could store and organise lots of data and track the success of the activities and services prescribed, and monitor their impacts on the individuals’ mental health.

The website uses a survey as the core functionality that carers will need to complete for each elderly person every three months. The website keeps track of the survey results to map the changes in mental wellbeing over time. For elderly people experiencing potential issues, the system prioritises them and asks the carers to follow up within a shorter timeframe. After the survey is completed, the website recommends activities and services that the carers can recommend to the elderly person. The survey also keeps track of the activities and services success rate through the survey.

The Result

A successful framework and starting point for Pungo to further develop JOY as an online support system for Age UK workers to connect with elderly communities.

Our survey-based web page enables social prescribers to move from a paper system to a digitised framework, making it easier for carers to monitor their clients’ mental wellbeing and suggest activities and services.

The webpage was demoed with Age UK, and they found it very useful and simple to use. JOY by Pungo will be taking this framework further and will continue to develop the system to grow its functionality.

Patrick Harding, CEO & Founder of Joy, reflects: “Softwire has given us the stepping-stone in the right direction. They prioritised the development and broke down the project for us to help us come up with a narrower, more focused scope. The team was impressive and kept up a high standard of communication with us”.