People make Partnerships

Guest blogger Anthony Fisher, Team Leader in a Community Care Team, social work student in the third sector and Scottish Collaborative Innovation Partnership Process (SCIPP) member attempts to simplify why partnership is the way ahead and that it's so much more than sharing office space.

We regularly use words like co-production, co-location, integration, collaboration and joined upness (yes I know that’s not a word!!!!!) to explain what partnership is and what it means but wouldn’t it much better to describe what we do as simply working together?

In 2012, the Scottish Collaborative Innovation Partnership Process placed a call out to service providers and innovators to discuss and design ways of providing future care outside of hospitals and that call was answered by over 120 organisations and representatives who quickly set about looking at each other’s projects and performing a task that Sylvia Wyatt from SCIPP has called welding.

There were significant ideas in the room to start with and many of the details of the ideas were shared and welded on different levels by a number of the representatives and I found that a few of the projects that I was involved with were coming through as good examples of how people get together, drop egos and just make things happen – in many ways the partnership found a way of doing what needed to be done and asking for permission later.

Within North Ayrshire, our recently born Health and Social Care Partnership is operating at the very forefront of ideas development and service provisioning and two prime examples of what the partnership is achieving are the Social Hubs within our new Sheltered Housing sites and the recently opened Montrose House and Stronach Resource Centre on the island of Arran.

The Social Hubs are fit for purpose, designed social centres that will allow older people to come and go in a building that will allow participation in activities, lunch clubs and social events whilst also allowing professional visiting services to be available in a one stop shop environment – the first of these will open this summer and will be run by a third sector organisation.

Montrose House is a state of the art complex that has recently been opened for long term, respite and rehabilitation care and day services. The planning and partnership development of this project has seen GPs, district nurses, service users, family, carers, architects, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, builders, social workers and third sector representatives come together to throw off the shackles of “can’t do” and “never have” and replace them with “let’s do” and “ask for permission later”.

Working together has meant that some of the old traditional role boundaries within Health and Social Care have dissolved away leaving a landscape that just feels much more natural and, well, nice to work in, and so much more involving of the people that we support through our service redesign and provisioning.

The Social Hubs in many ways epitomises what the SCIPP has set out to achieve and the whole term partnership has shifted from being about the words and terminology to being about what really, really matters – people.

Find more about the North Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership on Twitter #NAHSCP

Have a blether with me @AJPFisher

Some other views here - http://thirdforcenews.org.uk/blogs/time-for-a-social-enterprise-nhs
One of the SCIPP Drivers - http://nhsscotlandevent.com/speakers/peter-Williamson

Views expressed by guest bloggers may not reflect the views of What Works Scotland