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Persona use in Estonia

Estonia is currently undertaking a social service reform that is supported by a project funded by the Structural Reform Support Services of the European Commission. The project, coordinated by the International Foundation for Integrated Care (IFIC), is working with Estonian central agencies including the Ministry of Social Affairs, the Social Insurance Board and a selected group of local governments and municipalities with five main areas of focus:

  • Building a strategic framework within which to place the inter-related parts of social service, health, education and employment;
  • Identifying a suitable set of measures for integrated care at a national level;
  • Identifying and mapping pathways to help understand and map information and the journey for clients;
  • Creating a dataset to support the integrated care reform agenda – bridging policy, planning and delivery; and,
  • Identifying suitable funding models and incentives for integration within the new environment.

The objective of the project is to contribute to the development of a more integrated and person-centred provision of social, medical, and vocational support services to people with disabilities and elderly with high support needs in Estonia.

One of the four work streams focuses on models of care and used the Blueprint personas, the Blueprint is coordinated by empirica, as a basis for creating new personas. These personas have been created to fit the project’s purpose and target specifically the most relevant patient groups and needs in Estonia. Originally, eight personas were developed and presented to a multi-disciplinary/cross sectoral group of stakeholders for consideration in interactive workshops. Stakeholders agreed that all needs described in the personas were not uncommon amongst people requiring care and support. Therefore, the initial list of eight personas was consolidated into final five personas to be used to guide the analysis of processes, data, roles, and financial flows during the project. In a next step, a current state review of care pathway processes, workforce and services, information collection, recording and sharing, service funding flow was performed for each persona. In addition, each service and its workforce component were further analysed to produce a document providing a description, care sector, funding source, managing authority and service user eligibility.