Complaints handling toolkit

The Department of Health engaged us to develop a communication tool to educate aged care workers on best practice in handling patient & family complaints, with the goal of reducing the number of cases that were being escalated to a Government level of intervention.

Although there is a great deal of information to communicated, many workers in the field are time poor, do not speak English as their first language or have lower literacy skills.

Our solution was to present the information in a traditional manual style book, but to also produce a series of infographic posters distilled from the information in the manual that could be displayed in staff common areas at aged care facilities, as an alternative information delivery method for those who cannot access the manual due to time or literacy limitations.

As this is an emotionally heavy topic & one being communicated from above by a governing body, we believed that a lighter mood should be applied to the infographics to make them more accessible & appealing to general staff. To this end, the infographics were illustrated with customised characters who were able to express the emotions that were being discussed in each step of the process.

Because the characters were not strictly human, we were able to add slight variations in skin tone to cover any concerns about racial diversity rather than going down the clichéd path of the ‘United Colours of Benetton’, often used to cover all bases by ensuring every ethnicity is covered, which ironically is often viewed as a condescending approach.