Author: Darren Murinas, Chief Executive, Expert Citizens CIC.
Experts Citizens is a lived experience organisation who are a part of the Changing Futures Partnership. Expert Citizens and Stoke-on-Trent City Council are leading together on the Changing Futures partnership in Stoke-on-Trent.
We’ve worked in partnerships for many years now at Expert Citizens and we have really valued being a part of those partnerships, as well as the importance of partnership working generally speaking. It’s also about recognising within partnerships that each organisation holds a certain set of skills and knowledge, but very often, if we don’t work together, these skill sets are not utilised to their full potential.
We recognise that each partner, whether from public services, the voluntary sector or private sector brings something to the table. We believe at Expert Citizens that partnerships, collaborations and coalitions are really important to get where we need to get to in the world. We also believe that partnerships need to be equal, and like I previously mentioned recognising the importance of what each partner brings to the table.
In the context of Changing Futures, for example, we work with people who are experiencing multiple disadvantages – combinations of homelessness, mental ill health, people caught up in the criminal justice system, addiction and survivors of domestic abuse. You will traditionally have a multitude of services, who often work in isolation, that provide support in these areas.
We know working in isolation, or ‘silos’ doesn’t work well. It can create barriers for that individual, that customer, and we’re all here to support people to get the help that they need. By using a partnership approach we are able to tap into the different skill sets this brings simultaneously, dramatically improving the support received by our customers.
For us here at Changing Futures this is really important. It’s helpful to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers when they are trying to navigate the system or navigate services. When looking for a safety net of support what they often find is a spiders web of confusion. So it’s really important for us to facilitate more partnership working, providing a single point of access, and we need to look really deeply within the system to see how we can make this happen.
For us doing this includes the way we look at the commissioning process. We talk a lot about the importance of partnership working, but very often the way commissioning works is a bit like a competition. It’s basically one service saying they can provide more than another, and that they can deliver better outcomes for an individual than the next service. What we see with this approach is one service being decommissioned and replaced by another, which can be damaging to the support received by our customers – our customers lose trusting relationships with the professionals supporting them and services lose valuable knowledge about the people they are supporting. At Expert Citizens we believe a much better approach is to work together and play to the strengths that each service can bring to the table.
Another thing, which is really important in providing the best support possible, is looking at how we collect data and how we share that data between services. Improved sharing of accurate data not only improves efficiency for frontline workers but also prevents customers from having to repeat potentially retraumatising personal information.
In Stoke-on-Trent all partners of the Changing Futures programme have access to a shared client record management system, meaning data is easy to access when needed, and is as accurate and up to date as possible.
Another pitfall to services working in isolation, as opposed to partnerships, is the potential for duplication of work, which isn’t good for services, isn’t good for our customers and leads to inefficiency in the system overall.
As times get tougher, which they are currently, our concern is the resources to provide support to the people in our community that need it are dwindling, and the number of people needing support will inevitably rise. The need to work smarter and more efficiently therefore has never been greater than it is now.
At Expert Citizens we believe that partnership working is an obvious answer to reduce the mounting pressure being felt by services and we hope that by demonstrating this through the Changing Futures programme this model will be more widely adopted, ensuring we continue to provide the very best support possible within our communities.
