Communitydialogue

Meeting notes, 17th June 2008

We focused almost exclusively on the Roma project centred on Normanton. My fault, and apologies if anyone felt left out.

The focus of this project is ‘getting closer to the Roma’, some members of the group had been to an awareness-building session run by Adem Repesa from Derby City Council. This made an impact and much was still fresh in people’s minds; we discussed some of the surprises and the learnings about which we still had questions.

For me there were several things that came out of this discussion…

• The attributes of the people who had managed to get close to the Roma
• How will we maintain and develop this knowledge & understanding?
• How can we involve the Roma in what we’re doing?

Attributes
We realised that some people were being successful in getting close and that this was no accident – there were things they were doing, or not doing, that seem to be working. We spent a few minutes listing those things; they were…
Non judgemental
Approachable
Accessible
Visible
Interested
Personal
Agenda-less
Adaptable
Sensitive to their needs
Reliable & consistent
Friendly & warm
For me it is self-evident that services for the Roma should be all these things too. I think everyone agreed that these are important service aims; the parallel was drawn to the original values of the NHS and we reflected on the negative, blanding consequences of “the focus on outcomes”.

For more on this see the article on service design at the Design Council website.

Knowledge management
How do we maintain and ‘make actionable’ this knowledge and understanding? We didn’t talk for long about this, we’ll return to it again in another session. But we did note the importance of this information persisting, being spread and being used.

Going further
We talked about the need to go further, to develop our understanding, and Surinder reminded us that we need to involve the Roma in this work as much as possible. So we talked about the structures available for inclusion – the PCT health panel and the LINk, which is now up and running – also we covered some research techniques available to us…
Giving people video cameras, still cameras, voice recorders or diaries
Focus groups, action groups, encounter groups
Accompanied tours, living with the families

I outlined a tool I use to help me plan research and ensure I’m not missing something: Johari’s window. We’ll cover this in more detail in the more formal, cross-PCT sessions to be run soon.

A couple of interesting tensions surfaced during the session...

1. A sense in which everything has become very outcome focused, which means that activities with no immediately clear outcomes are difficult to prioritise.
2. That some of the techniques may be too invasive, resulting in us getting inappropriately close to the customer.

This prompted discussion of the “principles” that underlie design thinking and I’ve started to list them out. They work, but they will create tension in an ethical, caring organisation, especially in one that is risk-averse.

I’m certain that we will return to this issue and we’ll be pushing for people to explore doing the unthinkable – first thinking about what have I not done before, thinking through what’s the worst that can happen, then just doing it and assessing the value.

Future meetings will be similar in format – a project clinic, in which we discuss ways to deal with the issues that will crop up. Typically they will be every Tuesday afternoon and attendance discretionary; I will try to balance the time between the two Derby projects and, in due course, the Leicester projects, too.

Attending the meeting…
Julia Templeton
Sajda Kausar
Cheryl Elliot
Kay Moule
Sue McCrea
Surinder Mehan
Marlene Upchurch
Michelle Kendrick
Val Divers
John Topham
Rachel Gibson

Tour of Normanton

Today I met with…

Rachel Gibson, Project Manager for our community dialogue project
Sajda Kausar, Community Development Worker
John Topham, Public Health Strategy Manager

Normanton is an old-established area in the southern area of central Derby. I had heard that there were about 50 languages spoken here and the impression is of a wide range of ethnicities and faiths (the Hindu, Sikh, Christian and Moslem places of worship were all within a ¼ mile of each other, the shops advertised items for Asian and eastern European tastes).

Sajda took us around the area but admitted that she knows little about the Roma community, we talked for a while about who did and how we might access that information. It would seem reasonable to assume that many local agencies need intelligence about the culture, attitudes and behaviour of the Roma but we know of no ‘central’ resource in either DH, FCO or Home Office.

The project seems to be firming up as a process that helps develop a general understanding of, and hopefully engagement with, the Roma, uses that to assess needs and then uses all of that information to develop services.

We talked a little about how the PCT might position itself as an ‘information provider’ to other agencies who also need to understand minority ethnic groups (part of the local leadership WCC competency). From that idea we suggested that the PCT might try to organise a community-wide meeting where people might share what understanding they do have of, say, the Roma. We might facilitate that and introduce some external expertise to help calibrate, broaden or focus their local perspective. Again, this feeds into the local leadership idea.

Currently there is no ‘project’ – no team or statement of aims & scope – two people were mentioned, Bob and Kay, and Sajda expressed interest. I think Gill wants to do this and is likely to put the resources behind it (she’s back on Monday) so there is the germ of something and the desire to get started.

Structurally, there seems to be nowhere for this intelligence to reside, the PCT has no research or marketing group, no knowledge management function. Building something that gathers, holds and disseminates this population intelligence, perhaps as part of Gill’s ‘Engagement’ remit, seems to be the more strategic partner of this project.

Czech Roma

As we begin to engage with this project, we'll share reflections here