Expanding LINks?

Forget the DH site, the place to look for what’s happening in public and service user engagement is increasingly Communities and Local Government (CLG), which is churning out more useful stuff about civic engagement and community participation across the board. But should we welcome this uncritically, especially when it involves LINks? For instance, I noticed this in the most recent Consultation Institute newsletter:

“Gung-ho CLG seems so enthused by LINks that it seems keen to expand the concept beyond health and social care and is inviting Councils to submit proposals. Where this leads is anybody’s guess but the idea of networks of interested stakeholders is a powerful concept.”

Is this an idea linked (no pun intended) with CLG minister Hazel Blears – she of the recent community empowerment white paper and participatory budgeting experiments - to extend LINks straight across everything a Council does?   Sounds like the kind of thing that the ”government in waiting” might be keen on too.  And it is just the sort of development that some Councils might want for the wrong reasons.  A single tick box solution to involvement and consultation based on “we talked to LINk” is appealing but it is reductionist and simplistic.  We should be wary of this expansionist offer at least until we have some solid achievements with LINks in health and social care to point to and much more experience with the methodology of contacting, listening, understanding and transmitting views of local citizens.  But as the CI newsletter rightly says, the idea is powerful and something to think about for the future.

In the meantime here is a just published CLG report on barriers which people feel keep them from being able to influence local decision making.  Quite relevant for LINk and our understanding of participation generally I think. The biggest factor (barrier) is how much people trust their local council – perhaps an obvious conclusion but one that must be addressed where the answer is “not much”.

Readers could also dip into the CLG report on the New Deal for Communities pilots.  It is mercifully short and summarises lots of what we know already – so it provides a good and recent benchmark – about barriers and incentives to participation.  It talks about the “1% solution” we have previously discussed on this blog.   There is an allied report on what works well in communicationswith specific groups in the community.

This is all good stuff for us to know for LINks and Hosts should have these reports on their electronic reading lists.

An invitation to help us refocus our purpose and our offer

The Partnership is having one of those moments of corporate introspection when we look at what we do and think about the best way to explain it to our clients – present and future – and to ourselves too.

(jump to our strap-line competition here)

So we have done a bit of brainstorming and come up with twenty suggestions on how we might define what we offer to clients and encapsulate that in a pithy and memorable way. The new phrase will go as part of a new look on our website.

We need an outside eye and would like to invite you to help us choose which one describes us best. Our current account of ourselves and what we do can be seen at www.mooreadamsoncraig.co.uk and the associated blog site here (www.publicinvolvement.org.uk) site.

This is, as many readers will at once realise, is an example of the approach know as ‘crowdsourcing’. The phrase first appeared in an article in Wired in 2006 and the author Jeff Howe defined it as

“the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.“

Let’s Go Crowdsourcing

The current calls for user engagement and involvement can perhaps be seen as being part of that phenomenon with organisations formerly closed to the user interest and totally ‘captured’ by provider interests, open themselves up and unblock their ears to the external voice.

The new LINks organisations are intended to be important players in collecting and amplifying the voice of the crowd of users. The regulators in health and social care – at the moment plural as in the Healthcare Commission and the Commission for Social Care Inspection but soon to be singular: the Care Quality Commission – are touring the country to meet LINks people and work with them on the best way to feed into their assessment and inspection programmes. At the Cambridge event in September, it was very heartening to sit around the table with so many organisations focussing on how to make this work. The third sector who are working both as Host organisations as well as LINk member were well represented – Voluntary Norfolk was there (but not Compulsory Norfolk – no doubt no one had told them they had to come).

How we all laughed and there was remarkably little cynicism as in “we have been here before“. It would be wonderful if the regulators and indeed the Department of Health and other central government departments did work out a relationship with the local LINks that did not make the latter the poor bloody infantry of the regulatory system acting as unpaid data collectors for their assessment programmes while local issues and programmes were ignored. Instead there is room for a mutually profitable concordat between the individual and local voice of the user and those working at the national (English) level. Perhaps this time the views of the crowds outside the system really will count.

Back to our strap-line competition

Our suggested strap-lines / phrases are listed below and you are invited to pick your top 3 choices and the one you feel works best. Closing date 15th October 2008. Thank you.

The winners i.e. all those choosing what we think is the best out of our suggestions or even more excitingly coming up with one of their own which the Partners think hits the spot will be recognised as a hero/es. The choices of the Partners are open to discussion, scorn and mockery but we are very thick skinned given the amount of that sort of deplorable behaviour in our own meetings. So feel free to speak out and create.

Read the strap-lines and tell us your views here, or contribute by leaving a comment.

September Re-entry (September newsletter)

The title of the newsletter would sound better in French: ‘la rentrée’ – a season in France when the State re-awakens after its long summer off and the supermarkets are filled with bargain notebooks and pens – the ones that are all squares and no lines. It is much more than ‘back to school’ and money off school shoes.

On Leadership & Management in Business

Shoes are on my mind because I have been reading the latest book by John Timpson of Timpson Shoe Repairs. The book talks about the reasons for the survival of Timpson Shoe Repairs when so many other larger and equally well-established companies have gone to the wall. The high street is a pretty spooky place if you think about it filled with the ghosts of retail chains – ou sont tous les magasins ‘d’antan’? as François Villon would have put it looking at the C15th retail scene. The British Shoe Corporation was once the Colossus of the high street with 26% of the shoe trade. All gone. Timpson Shoes itself has bitten the dust. You will have the ones you miss in mind – was it Timothy White’s? Mac Fisheries perhaps? John Collier? Salisburys for a nice bag? All this is very timely as corporations crash and burn.

The Timpson answer to the question is not 42 but 28 bullet points on p186. My own take on his survival is that John has kept things under his control – no external shareholders, no private finance companies to keep happy. He bought the company back under family control and runs it the way he and now (other son) James wants. Timpson Shoe Repairs can do their own thing. This is refreshing as we watch so many managers struggle with the new demands for accountability and transparency while trying to innovate. Compare the ease with which a private retailer shuts shops and 100s of them with the long drawn-out agonies of the post offices closure programme. Are there not better ways to manage public change especially with failing institutions?

There is a Department of Health Consultation out on this very topic about the best way of coping with failing NHS providers as they move, in the careful parlance of the document, from being ‘underperforming’ to ’seriously underperforming’ to – the horror! the horror! – ‘challenged’.

At least the problem is being faced up to which is always an achievement in the NHS that bulky leviathan where change and innovation mean that institutions and managers are often ‘challenged’. And what politician wants to be associated with closure of services the voters want? In this complex environment, the race goes so often to the small and fleet of foot who like Timpson Shoe Repairs know their business and their users and can make things happen.

On Leadership, Management & Innovation in Health Services

Which is why 2nd September was such a good day in Leeds for Andrew Craig and our client the Motor Neurone Disease Association. The Association has developed a new product called the Year of Care (YoC) Pathway Commissioning Tool in two years which more than meets the challenges of World Class Commissioning.

Andrew had the pleasure of representing M-A-C at the Motor Neurone Disease Association Year of Care Pathway launch and “thank you” event at the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds earlier this month. It was well attended by mainly Leeds PCT and Leeds Social Services people and also people with MND and carers who had helped with interviews, focus groups and general validation of the draft pathway we undertook there.  Mick Ward, Head of Strategic Partnerships and Development across the PCT and Adult Social Services, gave the main speech and was excellent. This is just the kind of joint leadership that is needed to make progress for people with long term neurological conditions across the health and social care cultures. He committed the PCT and City Council to being in the MND Year of Care early implementers group so we shall be seeing more of him in the next twelve months. He related the YOC to the World Class Commissioning competencies and stressed the leadership, service transformation and market development aspects inherent in WCC. Clearly he sees the bigger picture. Andrew said he couldn’t have written it better himself! The Association has produced the ‘Learning from Leeds’ report by M-A-C as a 4 page colour brochure with pictures which looks terrific. Lunch was good and it was sunny and warm in Leeds. What more could one want?

For a flavour of the MND Year of Care pathway see the snapshot and read the press release

We will be putting more details about this work which we are proud to have been associated with on our website in due course. For more details of this event and an earlier one at the House of Lords as part of the NHS 60th Birthday celebrations, see the MND Association website.

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff, a Professor of Palliative Medicine said at the House of Lords event that

“This is one of the most important documents for patient care I have seen. This is exactly what the new NHS needs, a practical working tool to help achieve patients individual choice and improve their quality of life.“

Well done MND Association and while it may be strange to make a comparison between this terrible condition and shoe repairs, both achievements come from doing the best you can for your customers/users when you can with the resources available to you. Of course that will always involve other people – whether partners in PCTs and local Councils or staff and managers – but someone has to take the risks and do it first.

Survival often means not following the herd.

The challenge is to find the right leader and I will leave you with the definition of leadership given by the anonymous bard or bards who have handed down the text of The Wanderer, one of the most plangent and moving Anglo Saxon poems on the theme of ‘ubi sunt?’ mourning the good times in the past and musings on the qualities that make for success.

Wita sceal geþyldig                                          A wise man must be patient,

ne sceal no to hatheort                                    He must never be too impulsive

ne to hrædwyrde,                                            nor too hasty of speech,

ne to wac wiga                                               nor too weak a warrior

ne to wanhydig,                                              nor too reckless,

ane to forht ne to fægen,                                 nor too fearful, nor too cheerful,

ne to feohgifre                                                nor too greedy for goods,

ne næfre gielpes to georn,                               nor ever too eager for boasts,

ær he geare cunne.                                        before he sees clearly.

Bonne Rentrée and if Anglo Saxon verse is too cutting edge for you, take a look at our September post on how the Health Service and others are using the new social networking technology. One for your LINk perhaps?

P.S. We have been asked how to retrieve old blogs now that we have moved to the new style of presentation. These are all still available. The answer is on the right hand side of the blog page – try this link