Power to the people!

By Steve Palmer, Communications Manager at the Social Care Institute for Excellence

A popular TV sitcom in the 1970s starred Robert Lindsay, playing Wolfie Smith, the self-proclaimed leader of the revolutionary Tooting Popular Front, the goals of which were to gain ‘Power to the People’. The show, called Citizen Smith, didn’t rock the establishment, because the chances of popular revolution in Tooting were fairly unlikely. In fact, people often like democracy because you don’t have to be the people with power. You can get on with your life, bringing up families, dealing with challenges and being aspirational, just because you delegate responsibility for bin-collection, having a decent local hospital and accessing social care, to others.

But could it be that we could look at the idea of power in a different light, forty years after Wolfie Smith was advocating it in South London? Co-production is a word that’s getting very popular in social care circles. It means seeing people who use services, and carers, being centrally involved with the design, delivery and evaluation of care services.

Power surge

But it’s also about power. As we approach Co-production Week, organised by the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE), the theme for 2019 is “Power”. This might sound a bit pie-in-the-sky, but during the week we’ll be exploring how power can be shared more equally between professionals and people who use services - and carers. This is important stuff.

A board member at SCIE, Alex Fox, recently put it like this: Co-production is risky. You have to place trust in groups that you normally don’t work with. And it can take time. But he points out that much time is wasted because the most important people – people who use services and carers – were not part of the planning conversation.

Oxfordshire and Birmingham

Again and again we think, and the evidence suggests, that where you have this sort of input from experts-by-experience, then people’s experiences and outcomes can improve. SCIE has been working in Oxfordshire to embed co-production into their adult social care services. A group of Co-production Champions is made up of people who use services, carers, Council staff, professionals from health and social care, and voluntary sector organisations who are learning and working together to make change happen.

Birmingham City Council’s People Directorate is one of Think Local Act Personal’s Making it Real sites. It has developed a range of structures to support co-production work with citizens. These include: Two citizen-led quality boards that co-produce minimum standards for services; making sure that people who use services are involved as early as possible in specific projects and at all stages of service development; and allocating resources and staff time to supporting co-production.

I wonder what Wolfie Smith would make of this new demand to share power? There’s no storming of the barricades, but there is a hope that we are dismantling barriers to getting things done in the way that people who use services – and carers – know is more likely to work. And I think Wolfie would quietly agree that Co-production Week in July is a great place to embrace this.