Francesca Ainsworth, Sophie Humphries and Ally Macleod from Aberdeenshire Council highlight their plans for working with What Works Scotland

Francesca Ainsworth, Sophie Humphries and Ally Macleod from Aberdeenshire Council highlight their plans for working with What Works Scotland.

Aberdeenshire is delighted to have been chosen as a case study area and welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with What Works Scotland. The sheer size of Aberdeenshire alone creates numerous challenges to the design and delivery of both public and third sector services – added to this is the rural nature of the area, the diversity of our communities and the shifting demographics of our population.

Our initial bid focused on a joined up model of local service planning and partnership working which has proven successful in Aberdeenshire. There is a need now to build on that success by evidencing the impact of local planning and delivery to drive further improvement - something we felt that What Works Scotland is ideally placed to help us with.

Since learning that our bid was successful, we have consulted with a range of community planning partners and, with the help of the What Works Scotland team, we have narrowed the focus of our bid into three specific challenges that we wish to address.

These are:

1.  Road Safety and Prevention
2. Local Community Planning, and
3. Health and Social Care Integration (Locality Planning). 

When considering each of our three projects, broadly the same questions cropped up time and again.  We have taken this as a sign to focus each of the three projects around answering these key questions:

• What makes a partnership and collaborative working a success?
• What data and information is needed to evidence the impact of partnership working and early intervention/prevention work to drive improvement?
• How are relationships managed and tensions resolved between different levels of a partnership (e.g. between frontline staff and management, between partner organisations, public sector organisations and communities)?

On the 11^th December we will be joining What Works Scotland and the other case study areas to present our progress to national partners to start having wider discussions about how these bigger networks can get involved. We are looking forward to working with the What Works Scotland team, their partners and other case study areas over the next few years. We will most certainly be looking to others to learn from their experiences and, in turn, hope that the work we are embarking on in Aberdeenshire will be of benefit to other areas of Scotland as well. We’ll be back in the new year to let you know how we’re getting on!