The Community Dialogue Project
Our Aims
In 2007 the East Midlands PCTs' Chief Executives recognised the need in the changing climate to find new and innovative ways to engage their populations in the commissioning and delivery of services or approaches to improving and managing health. They shared the belief that supporting people to provide solutions to their health and care needs would be the only way to deal with the rising tide of health issues that are forecast. This project was commissioned across two PCT's to explore and pilot the use of the co-production and co-creation approaches to health and to provide frameworks for use across the region to implement this approach.
There was also the realisation that there is good alignment between what is required in co-production and the World Class Commissioning competencies. This project provided a way in which to explore and embed those competencies in the work being undertaken.
The background research considered was Edgar Cahn's "No more throw away people", 2000, which suggests that co-produced services are the only way to deal successfully with the near-epidemic proportions of long term conditions.
The NICE guidance "Community Engagement to Improve Health" (2008) outlines Popays model (2006) which demonstrates the positive impact of co-production on improving health outcomes and reducing health inequality.
Significant research on self-efficacy underpinning their Co-creating Health Project is cited by the Health Foundation, this was considered alongside concepts relating to the creation of Social Capital as discussed by Robert D Putman in 1993.
The following aims and objectives were set for the project:
- Develop and produce a framework for co-creating solutions with communities, following the dialogue process, undertaken within the context of resource allocation/prioritisation.
- Develop, pilot and iterate a tool to evaluate what the people living in communities think of the engagement processes and what they would consider to be improvements in health.
- A document describing the process developed during the pilot and the lessons learnt.
- Produce a toolkit - Information, work plans, methodologies, check lists, templates etc, and ‘how-to-do' guides based on project work (to be used for roll-out to other East Midlands PCTs) on what interventions work best in which scenarios, work plans etc.
- Guidelines on how to frame the dialogue within the context of resource allocation/prioritisation, not just asking communities what it is they want.
- Guidelines on how PCTs can move from pilot projects to a systemised approach across the communities served by the PCT.
