INSIGHT Health: Meet Andy Meakin

Author: Andy Meakin, Director of Funding and Commercialisation, Expert Citizens

I’m delighted to be joining Expert Citizens as a Director and really looking forward to the exciting work ahead this year.  While I’m new as an employee, many friends of Expert Citizens will already recognise me and be aware that I’ve worked alongside the organisation since almost the beginning.

My previous role was a Project Director of VOICES.  In that role I provided leadership to a successful £10m partnership made possible by The National Lottery Community Fund through their Fulfilling Lives programme.  It was through this partnership, along with the vision of people with lived experience, that Expert Citizens was born.  Lived experience was central to VOICES and I’m delighted that work is being strengthened through our involvement in Changing Futures.  I was delighted to lead the partnership and author the proposal that led to the award of £3.9m for the City through Changing Futures.

It’s been an immense privilege through those years to walk with Darren, Rachele, and the growing team at Expert Citizens on that journey.  It has certainly been a highlight of my career so far and I’m a huge admirer of what’s been achieved by Expert Citizens through the leadership and bravery of the whole team in that time.

Prior to VOICES, I spent some time as a self-employed management consultant working with Local Authorities and third sector organisations in the context of supported housing and homelessness.  This is often characterised as borrowing people’s watch to tell them the time.  That’s not too far wrong, but sometimes involved helping to find the watch or perhaps even make it.  But, my background before that was as a senior manager in local government.

At Cheshire West and Chester Council I was the Supplier Relationship Manger for Adult Social Care and Supported Housing services valued more than £70m and supporting 20,000 people per year.  This involved overseeing the contract management and quality of services as well as supporting the commissioning and mobilisation of new services.  While there, I led on the redesign and recommissioning of services for people experiencing homelessness.  That project was part of a high-profile national pilot for the implementation of payment by results which was a first for those types of services.  We conducted an extensive exercise involving people with lived experience of homelessness in the design of the new service.  Experts by experience were meaningfully involved from the beginning to the very end including all the way through the procurement process.  This was a genuine penny drop moment for me about the huge value of lived experience and I’ve been a passionate champion ever since.  The effort was very new at the time and led to a few articles in the trade press.  Although, I remain sceptical of the value of payment by results in these contexts.

I’ve also spent six years working at Stoke-on-Trent City Council and was promoted to the position of Supporting People Manager.  Again, I led on contract management, quality, and commissioning in the context of supported accommodation.  Among other things, I helped to mobilise a new drug and alcohol service and new sheltered accommodation.  However, the project of which I’m most proud was the work to redesign and recommission floating support which delivered tenure neutral housing-related assistance to more than 600 people at any one time.

In my new role at Expert Citizens, my main activity for the next 12-months will be leading on the marketing intelligence and business modelling of the “Insight | Public Involvement” project working in partnership with Keele University.  This work has tremendous potential for Expert Citizens and is built on the strong foundations of the Insight standards applied to the context of health research and, hopefully later, social care research.  It was inspired by the national Insight Awards by Expert Citizens and has already been piloted successfully in three settings.  That work was funded through National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and completed in partnership with Keele University, University Hospital North Midlands (UHNM), and the Midlands Partnership Foundation Trust (MPFT).  As I joined, this work won the “Public & Patient Involvement & Engagement” category in the CRN West Midland Network Awards for 2021.  So, I’m delighted that we’re off to a flying start.  But there’s much work still to do.

In addition to the work with Expert Citizens, I’m also a research fellow with CHAD at Staffordshire University, through which I’ve co-authored a number of academic journal articles about multiple disadvantage and lived experience.  I’m a member of the Hardship Commission for Stoke-on-Trent and sit on the Collaborative Network for Stoke-on-Trent too.  I studied locally, at Keele University, for a degree in Politics and Environmental Management then a Masters in Business Administration.

In my spare time, I’m an enthusiastic motorcyclist and fan (read fanatic) of motorcycle racing.  I love current affairs and reading, not so many novels, more topical factual stuff like biographies, autobiographies, travelogs, and political polemics.  If you ask me about politics, be sure to bring a chair!  I’ve a 16-year-old son who is in to writing his own music and is unbelievably talented which he certainly doesn’t get from me.  I live locally, near the village where I grew up in Chesterton, with my partner Kim and two cats – Jake and Bean – whose hobby appears to be destroying soft furnishings.  They have their own Insta account.

Please feel free to get in touch.  I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Andy

andy.insight@expertcitizens.org.uk