Safety in Care

Supporting leaders to navigate tensions

Improving safety practices involved navigating complex design tensions – balancing the need to keep young people and staff safe from harmful items while upholding dignity during searches and long-term stays in secure care. I used artefacts including design principles, personas and service blueprints to maintain a people-centred perspective, and raised risks with senior leaders when safety and dignity were in conflict.

Establishing project foundations

Competing stakeholder priorities created ambiguity around the project goal. For some, success meant eliminating all harmful items — but pursuing that too aggressively risked increasing high-risk physical searches and compromising the dignity of young people in care.

To resolve this, I facilitated workshops with the project team to define a shared goal and design principles that could guide decisions when tensions arose. I also successfully recommended alternative safeguards to reduce harmful items entering secure care, without defaulting to increased searches.

Facilitating workshops with competing needs

Search practices sit at the intersection of safety, legislation, trauma, culture and human rights – meaning the people involved have directly competing needs. I facilitated targeted workshops with rangatahi, kaimahi (staff) and leadership separately, ensuring insights from each group genuinely informed the emerging design rather than being drowned out by organisational priorities or the loudest voice in the room.

Raising and mitigating safety risks

In every conversation with staff, there was a concern about how the new legislation and changes could harm them. I facilitated a multi-disciplinary workshop to suggest recommendations and ways to mitigate the risk through policy, how the plan and supporting guidance were designed, and through reporting and monitoring.

The end result is a service that meets the legislative intent, helps keep young people and staff safe.

From compliance to conversation

Prototyping directly with staff and young people in youth residences surfaced insights that helped simplify the service experience while still meeting complex legislative requirements.

Through this process, the safety plan evolved from a compliance document into a tool for staff and young people to have a genuine, relational conversation – with the plan itself serving as a record of the young person's needs and how staff could uphold them.

Illuminating the path forward for delivery

The discovery and design work established a clear foundation for service implementation – giving the programme the evidence, artefacts and direction needed to move into delivery with confidence.

• Senior leadership supported to navigate tensions, mitigate risks and unblock critical delivery milestones through compelling, evidence-based artefacts.

• Design principles, personas and current state mapping adopted as the foundation for the programme – ensuring young people's needs remained central in a high-pressure environment.

• Future state service blueprint and tested prototypes used to inform implementation decisions.

• Search plan prototype redesigned from a compliance document into a facilitation tool that supported kaimahi to have relational, trauma-informed conversations with young people.