Helping to make care better connected

By Lizzie Cernik, Communications officer, The Professional Records Standard Body (PRSB)

Lizzie's blog talks about Simone 

Let me introduce you to Simone Illger. Simone has helped us to support the development of the ‘About Me’ section of our website - in a person’s care record. She’s been sharing what she feels is important to her. She has had experience using social care and health services for most of her adult life, after her development was affected by the drug Thalidomide before birth.  

Simone says she’s always been fiercely independent. Her house has great adaptations to help her to live comfortably, but Simone says that when she leaves the house, she can lose her independence. Simone’s very confident and will ask someone in a shop to reach something that she wants but she wants more from society! She talks about being invited to a meeting but the button in the car park she was told to park in was out of reach. She had to rely on the kindness of strangers to help her out. Simone goes on to talk about hospital admissions. She prefers it when medial professionals try to find out about her. Simone wants to live in a world where assumptions aren’t made about her disability.  

Simone’s story on YouTube 

Co-production Week 2020 

The About Me section forms part of the new standards that the Professional Record Standards Body are developing, that will help to support better information sharing between social care and health. This in turn will lead to more connected services and more personalised care and wellbeing that can be tailored to each individual.

The PRSB is currently seeking more opinions from social workers, health and care professions, informal carers and people who use services. As well as 'About Me', we are looking for views on other areas of information sharing in social care and health, including transfers of care and what is needed in an emergency or when a referral is made. 

We'd like to invite you to complete these two short surveys on social care information. There is also an easy read version of the survey, as well as support materials to help people who have difficulty reading to complete it. 

Please help us to bridge the gaps between social care and health to deliver a better future for everyone who needs to use services. 

See also 
Using standards to make care safer and more personalised - By Professor Maureen Baker CBE, Chair, Professional Record Standards Body

Co-production in 2020: A tech revolution?

By James Anthony, Digital Communications Officer at SCIE

Growing up in Norfolk highlighted the stark contrasts in digital isolation

It’s been amazing to lead on SCIE’s Co-production Week 2020 and embrace new ways of working. This year, I’ve helped to co-produce and deliver a workshop with 50 participants, plus broadcast a webinar to nearly 500 people – completely remotely. This isn’t something we would even have dared to attempt before March.

It’s also made a big difference in changing attitudes to remote working. This might come as an eye-roll moment for some who have been asking organisations to be more accommodating to remote working for years, something which is vital for good co-production. Suddenly it has become acceptable. As Ossie Stuart put it during our webinar “What [COVID-19] has shown us is that, people can change their minds”.

Those of us celebrating a tech revolution and welcoming this shift in attitudes, however, ought to be cautious.

There are many people here in the UK who don’t have great access to technology. These barriers to using technology tend to be higher for older people, those with disabilities or ethnic minorities. All of these groups need to be fully engaged for meaningful co-production to take place.

It feels strange to think about a life without connective technology all around us, having grown up with an internet connection as part of my childhood. I really felt this difference when I started my working life at a small carers charity in Norwich and across Norfolk, where many people were isolated because of their lack of access to technology, and couldn’t participate in co-produced work due to struggles in using email, smartphones, or websites.

Our answer then was to stick to traditional methods of communication including printed materials, phone calls and face-to-face visits. If organisations are looking to cut back on spending, it might be tempting to stop sending physical letters or reduce staff time for phone calls and visits, but they really are valuable. Their loss would be felt by those for whom hopping onto the internet is not a viable substitute. For any organisations engaging in co-production – great – but make sure to check you’re still using those traditional communication methods to include everyone.

More importantly, in the long term, resources need to prioritise digital inclusion. If service providers are serious about co-producing design, delivery and evaluation of a service with people who use them then time, effort and money needs to be invested into building digital skills for all. Don’t just rely on the ‘tech revolution’ that COVID-19 has brought us.

And of course – where co-production and digital inclusion is done well, celebrate it! That’s what Co-production Week is all about. Watch our webinar to find out more.

Co-production in a changing world

By Angela Catley, Director of Development, Community Catalysts 

I sat down to write something for #coproweek and realised I wasn’t totally sure where my head was at on this essential approach. Not that this piece is a work in progress or anything! Here at Community Catalysts we have been huge advocates of co-production for many years – learning from allies like Clenton Farquharson and the National Co-production Advisory Group (NCAG), supporting small care enterprises with coproduction at the heart of their design and delivery and running many projects with the slogan ‘nothing about us, without us’ front and centre. 

Co-production Week 2020 >>>

Then came Covid-19 and that tremendous community response followed by discussions about how to keep the momentum, #buildbackbetter and ensure that people at the heart stayed that way. This resonates with us of course – as committed community catalysts how could we not believe that people and communities have so many answers to the challenging questions we currently face. But it was also part of my head scratching as I began to write. What could co-production look like in this rapidly changing world as we all move forward together? 

I started thinking about the recent work we have been involved in. Local Area Coordination  and the kind of work undertaken by model leaders like Swansea but also the Great Communities Project in partnership with the charity MacIntyre , our People Can work with the council and community in Kingston and our work with Camphill Village Trust in rural North Yorkshire. What they all have in common is an investment in people who might otherwise be seen only in terms of their ‘needs’ – a focus on the things that makes people valuable and valued rather than vulnerable. What they also have in common, I realised as I mulled, is they don’t co-produce in a traditional way.

"Co-production is not just a word, it is a meeting of minds to find a shared solution. In practice, it involves people who use services being consulted, included and working together". - SCIE.

What they do is something really interesting – they ‘lead from behind’.

“It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur”.  - Nelson Mandela

They all consult, include and work together but they also invest in, build up and push to the front the people who might naturally step back.  As I tweeted at the height of the recent crisis:

Just thinking that if every one of the @GoodSamApp volunteers asked every one of the 1.5million shielded people 'what can you give' as well as 'what do you need' - the impact could be momentous!

In these post Covid-19 times as people who quickly stepped forward to help their community almost silently drift back - I wonder whether co-production with this kind of ‘lead from behind’ focus is something that public sector bodies and large local organisations could and should quickly engage with. I also wonder just how powerful and transformative that could be.