Communitydialogue

Working Lunch event

I have uploaded our invite to the Highfields Cook & Eat, Working Lunch event.  I thought this might be useful if you are arranging similar public events for your own projects.

Please note, this is NOT an open invitation!  As much as Naim and I would love to have you all over for lunch, we do have limited resources ;-)

View the invite here:  Download invite_textfinal.pdf

Feelin' Groovy

Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a part of the Community Dialogue Programme, however I think this is a perfect working example of the motto be the change you want to see.   New ways of thinking and communicating often have to start within the organisation, and then roll out to members of the public.

The feel good workshop was held at NHS Leicester City recently and looked at the importance of mental health and well-being to us all.  Through a series of interactive exercises, we focused on what made us feel good in our day-to-day lives (and what made us feel not so good).

Our facilitator talked us through some simple relaxation techniques, and as a group we shared ideas about meditation, exercise and even had a go at laughter therapy!

We also got the chance to see a new technique called ‘Graphic Recording’ in action;  this is a simple, visual technique that can be used to plot the journey of a forum or event whilst overcoming certain communication barriers.  It is helpful for people with learning difficulties, or for whom reading and writing is a challenge.  We were all excited by this technique and the opportunities to use this for recording our community resident meetings were obvious – so much so, that many of my NHS Leicester colleagues are now being trained to be in-house graphic recorders.

I feel that workshops like this will be a valuable tool in the Keeping Saffron in Mind tool-kit and a positive, practical step towards the prevention of low-level mental health problems. 

Early signs of success in Derby?

Our two projects in Derby really seem to be getting good participation and reach.

In Normanton, working with the Roma has generated a growing group of people who not only attend the meetings held by our team but are prepared to participate and work with us. The team, Sue & Kay, are organising a conference in February of next year, in which the Roma will play key roles; the conference will be used to share knowledge and raise awareness nationally about the Roma, their lives and culture. There will be invited guests from several countries and narratives from the Roma themselves, describing life here and in Slovakia.

Sue and Kay are also a lot clearer about the needs of the Roma in the UK and we started to sketch out some service ideas – assertive outreach and practice-based services – and how they might be designed to be most acceptable to the Roma families. In terms of coproduction, apart from their guidance and contribution to the conference, we’re wondering whether we could specify a service that hosts members of any new community to act as “ambassadors”, taking their hard won knowledge of UK life to newer entrants who share their language or culture.

The Sinfin Fun Day is almost upon us (as I write in early October); Michelle and Marlene, our two lead members of the community have been working increasingly hard to bring this together, but it’s clearly going to happen and be a success. And boding well for the future, they are now getting a lot of people coming forward with ideas and energy, so their plans for a significant Sinfin Carnival in the summer are getting support.

As a coproduction, the carnival is looking like a success. From a traditional health perspective, however, the story is harder to tell; clearly we have co-created a local initiative that has engaged, enthused and socialised, it may well have had tangible benefits to physical and psychological health, but can we tell and is it enough?

The team will take part in the Fun Day and assess its reach and impact, we will also use it to engage with the community on their health needs and see whether we can identify new capabilities or problems.

Tues 12th August 2008 project update meeting

The Derby team at their weekly design meeting.

Derby Kick-off meeting summary

Thank you all who participated in this meeting, held on the 14th May in the Village Street Health Centre in Derby; this mail is to summarise what we discussed and decided.

Evaluation

We very quickly built up a long list of measures at various levels of generality. Nene Ankrah has the detailed notes and he will review them and come up with a set of recommended measures that we can agree and follow through.

The tone around the room was that we have the balance about right; we have included within our proposal a number of ways in which we will capture “stories” and qualitative information, it is our practice to value these, and we will complement them with a small number of “hard” or quantitative measures.

As a start to this Martin Wells video recorded the introductions and summaries of the meeting. These are available on YouTube (just in case you thought it was only for youngsters) and are available elsewhere on this blog.

Sinfin

John Topham and Gill Collinson described a situation that they acknowledge is typical and at the heart of this project: the proposal for the Sinfin ‘lifestyle service’ has been written and is heading into the commissioning process but contains little or no firsthand information from the people of Sinfin.

We reiterated the importance of this project to the Derby City PCT 10 year strategy and also acknowledged the needs for better engagement, the desire for this to be seen to be a ‘local initiative’ and also how any service could develop into a social enterprise.

The timing of the project is complex – the commissioning process is lengthy and needs to start; this project will operate in parallel to that as much as possible, informing the commissioners and service specification and working with whatever style of procurement that emerges.

The Organisational Development perspective was that this is a great way to explore what it takes for the PCT to get behind this type of project and to keep on doing that; to make the type of engagement we envisage ‘normal’.

Normanton

Although the core issue in this project is engagement with the Roma, this is taken to be indicative of the way in which the PCT needs to operate with each community or group with which it must relate and enter into dialogue. It is clear there are a lot of anxieties centred on this ethnic group, some of which are likely to be the result of a lack of understanding.

A new director of performance and knowledge management has been hired; it is important we work alongside this function so that the understandings we produce are usable within and beyond the PCT.

We reiterated the value of using this project to position the PCT as ‘health leaders’, and to work with other agencies similarly interested in community dialogue (for example, Lincs PCT have expressed interest). The organisational development work will raise the issue of how Derby City creates and maintains its relationships with other agencies, although in the time we have together we’re likely only to start this discussion.

Other issues

The first meeting of the steering group of this project has been arranged for 28th May.

The next meeting of the EM Development Group (of which this project is a part) is tentatively scheduled for the 2nd June, this is being arranged by the SHA’s office of the PCTs.

Gill raised governance issues for this project; Rachel Gibson will be responsible for submitting monthly reports to the Office of the PCTs, these will include the project burn rate and progress towards goals.

Kick-off meeting in Derby, 14th May

I've uploaded to our YouTube account the video footage taken at our meeting in Derby on Wednesday 14th May 2008 it (they) can be found at http://www.youtube.com/martinwellsCIHMEMids

There are about 20 videos in all, from many of the participants at that meeting, describing their hopes for the project, why we're doing it, and what they feel the challenges will be.

Project learnings

This is where we'll publish and share the learnings from this work