Dundee Recovery Road Map is a social platform that brings the Dundee community together. It provides signposting, information, and directions to useful local services for mental health support, food provision, addiction and recovery support, harm reduction, health and wellbeing, rehabilitation, peer support, as well as family and carer support. It aims to help vulnerable people by giving them immediate access to support and promoting mental and physical wellbeing. It also reduces the amount of time people are spending researching services and ensures they have accurate and up-to-date information regarding their opening times and days of operation to ensure no one is turned away.
The app is completely free to use and makes support services more visible and accessible for a range of individuals and aims to remove the stigma around seeking help by providing a map and list view of available services, their locations, and opening times, as well as further contact details for offline support. As the app gives directions in Google Maps, users are also able to take advantage of Google’s accessibility features, live traffic updates, and more to help make their journey to a session easier and less stressful (as sessions can also run across several locations, Google Maps also provides users with information about wheelchair accessibility at each location).
The Dundee Recovery Road Map app was commissioned by Parish Nursing Dundee and co-ordinated by Kirsty Nelson, a full-time Parish Nurse at the Steeple Church. Kirsty and her team work with people across the city to make support services accessible to vulnerable individuals alongside supporting their journey of mental and physical recovery.
The Parish Nursing Dundee team first met Zudu in 2021 as we were brought in to redesign and develop a new app for Dundee Recovery Road Map with an accompanying admin panel so services and events could be added more easily and managed by Parish Nursing Dundee in real-time. With this additional feature, the app was able to support the inclusion of new services such as mobile food banks and soup kitchens (offering both hot and cold food) to help tackle food poverty in Dundee. As the app previously required services to be hard-coded, the old version was not able to support the food bank listings due to their varying locations and opening times - as banks are volunteer-run, the times and locations were set to change on a weekly basis. In the app’s present version, the food banks are visible during their hours of operation and their location can be moved to help direct people more easily and spread awareness about local food banks to help more people gain access to hot food and non-perishable food supplies in an effort to support people living in poverty.
The app’s main features include:
- Easy to use UI and simple UX to help users of all ages and technical abilities use the app
- Service listings for physical and online services (as well as session times)
- Event listings for ad-hoc events happening in the city that app users can get involved in
- Full access to the app services and features without an account - once you have downloaded the app, there is no need to sign up - so no barriers to entry for users
- Filters by service category (both in map and list view)
- Full details for individual services and events as well as contact details for reaching out to organisers or getting additional support
- Bookmarks feature to help users keep track of services and events they are interested in
- Users can also choose to enable location services in-app to see how far away they are from specific services / events
In the next phase of this project, we’ll be turning the mobile app into a web app to help reach even more users and provide support for individuals who do not have access to a personal computer or smartphone.
(Zudu’s project case study can be found at https://zudu.co.uk/projects/dundee-recovery-road-map).