Power to the People! How we work with people and communities
We recognise the inherent power of people and communities within Lancashire and South Cumbria. So a fundamental part of our population health approach is working with people and communities to better understand their issues, harness their will for change and together develop solutions for the future of our health and care system.
We realise for this to be successful we cannot simply apply a universal methodology and a ‘one size fits all’ approach to involving people and communities in our work. ‘Success’ is defined by what the individuals and communities we work alongside recognise as reflecting their own priorities and energy for change.
Key to what good looks like in Lancashire and South Cumbria is the implementation of our working with people and communities strategy. Click here to view the strategy in full.
Principles
In developing this strategy we agreed 10 fundamental principles:
- Put the voices of people and communities at the centre of decision-making and governance, at every level of the system.
- Start engagement early when developing plans and feed back to people and communities how their engagement has influenced activities and decisions.
- Understand your communities’ needs, experience and aspirations for health and care, using engagement to find out if change is having the desired effect.
- Build relationships with excluded groups, especially those affected by inequalities.
- Work with Healthwatch and the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise (VCFSE) sector as key partners.
- Provide clear and accessible public information about vision, plans and progress, to build understanding and trust.
- Use community development approaches that empower people and communities, making connections to social action.
- Use coproduction, insight, and engagement to achieve accountable health and care services.
- Coproduce and redesign services and tackle system priorities in partnership with people and communities.
- Learn from what works and build on the assets of all system partners – networks, relationships, activity in local places.
Behaviours
Our approach to the delivery of these principles is a set of behaviours that we have coproduced with system partners and colleagues:
- Unashamedly inequality and inequity focused – we will have a clear focus on those who face the greatest barriers or challenges in accessing services and have the worst health outcomes.
- Self-identified communities – allow people and communities to define the communities which they self-identify with so that they can relate to the system at their chosen level. This could be hyper-local, place-level or defined by needs and circumstances, not geographical.
- Tailored approaches – there will be no ‘one size fits all’. Localism is key to this work and our approaches will need to be appropriately tailored to the identified community.
- Organic growth – communities and places are different by their very nature with contrasting needs and appetite for participation. We recognise there are different starting points across our system so must not expect the same speed or depth of empowerment and participation from every area.
- Connectedness, confidence and control (three Cs) – we will support people to feel connected to their community, confident to act and in control of their own and wider communities’ health and wellbeing. We will support community-led, grass-roots participation initiatives as far as appropriately possible.
- Enable the good to flourish – we will share knowledge, skills and expertise within places and across the wider system in order to support, spread and adopt (if appropriate) good practice of community empowerment and participation.
- Committing to this work for the long-term – the associated impacts and outcomes resulting from empowered people and communities do not happen overnight; creating the social movement required will take intensive effort over a long period of time.