If you want to transform adult social care, health, or public services more generally, stop obsessing about ‘demand management’. Start with citizen contact.

If you want to transform adult social care, health, or public services more generally, stop obsessing about ‘demand management’. Start with citizen contact. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_citizen-contact-driven-transformation-activity-7421826868594528258-K6Ag

If you want to transform adult social care, health, or public services more generally, stop obsessing about ‘demand management’.

Start with citizen contact.
Not as a call centre. Not as a cost to minimise. Not as a front door you try to keep shut.

Citizen contact is the system’s main sensing organ. It’s where people tell you, in their own words, what’s going wrong. It’s also where you either build capability – or manufacture dependency.

Here’s the ugly bit: most ‘managing demand’ is just delay, deflection, denial. It doesn’t reduce demand. It distorts it, shifts it around the system, and then congratulates itself for ‘handling volume’. That’s how you create repeat contact, failure demand, and collapsing trust.

The better framing is simple and operational. Make the front door the place where demand turns into one of three things, quickly and well:
1 resolution (problem solved),
2 enablement (person leaves more able than when they arrived),
3 or legitimate escalation (specialist work only when it’s genuinely needed).

Everything else is pinball. People bounced between teams, forms, scripts, channels, referrals, ‘signposting’. And we call it success because a spreadsheet says ‘referred onward’.

A form is a conversation in slow motion. A script is a conversation under pressure. If you design either for speed, you get speed and rework. If you design for first contact resolution, you start fixing the actual system defects: confusing forms, poor signposting, broken handoffs, downstream processes that can’t deliver.

And the most counterintuitive point is cybernetic: measures create purpose.
– Measure average handle time and you will get short calls and repeat demand.
– Measure problems solved and people enabled and you’ll get learning, redesign, and demand genuinely falling rather than being pushed elsewhere. That’s #SystemsThinking in practice, not slogans.

So yes, this is ‘customer contact’. But it’s also strategy. It’s service design. It’s #publicservicereform. And it’s the most practical route I know to doing #adultsocialcare and #health differently, because it forces you to design against real demand rather than imagined processes.

If your front door suddenly became your main learning system – not your main cost centre – what would you have to stop measuring, even if it made this month’s performance report look worse?