Partnerships: one smells sweet...the other doesn't

Topics: partnership stories, CVS, waste

Two interesting items caught my eye today. One is an initiative in Cornwall, the other an inspection in Oxfordshire.

The secret language of posies

In Cornwall, they've recently held an event to celebrate and strengthen the realtionship between the public and voluntary sectors. This year's theme was the "language of flowers".

A dictionary of flower meanings was displayed on posters around the room, and guests were invited to bunch locally grown flowers using the Victorian 'Language of Flowers' to create coded messages, all reflecting thoughts on what constitutes or would help promote a positive working relationship. For example, one guest chose Forsythia, Garlic and Oak-leaved Geranium to create a message which meant 'anticipation and courage...leading to...true friendship'.... Yet another selected Stephanotis, Daffodil, Bluebell and Alstroemeria which when decoded means 'happiness in marriage, respect, constancy and friendship'.



Daffs and bluebells symbolise respect and constancy in partnership

It's not rubbish, it's fair.

Meanwhile in Oxfordshire, the Audit Commission has deemed the Oxfordshire waste partnership a "Fair Service, with uncertain prospects for improvement"

It's not normally my wont to trash partnerships in this blog, and that's not what I'm attempting to do. I think the summary findings are interesting:

Oxfordshire Waste Partnership has not delivered on key aims such as integrating waste collection and disposal or improving value for money, although the county compares well on recycling, composting and waste levels. Its progress to address Oxfordshire's waste issues has noticeably improved. But the councils still need to make difficult decisions before an effective new strategy is in place.

The Commission acknowledges that improvements have been made - and from a quick glance the service doesn't seem that bad. Some of the main criticisms from the summary of the inspection report seem to be that the partneship may not be really working as a partnership and that improvements seem to be down to the contributions of individual partners. I haven't looked at this in depth, but this does seem to illustrate some of the difficulties of partnerships - that maybe this partnership isn't as strong as the constituent councils.

Synergy
I thought these two stories were an interesting contrast - one smelling sweet, the other not, but both illustrating the importance of working together to come up with something that's greater than the sum of its parts. In the PM Partner project we'll be looking at adding value by working together in a few weeks, and these examples will provide some interesting food for thought.

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PM Partner update 31 August

PM Partner update

New guidance for partnership agreements. Laura Julve, one of my colleagues, has pulled together the elements found in Local Strategic Partnership agreements. It's a fairly comprehensive list with explanations of elements and it's backed up by examples. But I'm sure it's by no means exhaustive. Go and have a look - share your own examples.

I've added a few bits and pieces to the community and voluntary sector page, but the page still seems a little paltry. Please share your experience of public/voluntary sector partnerships.

PM Partner update 30 August

PM Partner update

We have new topics on partnership structures and partnerships agreements. There's also more information about the work the LGA is doing on customer intelligence on the users and citizens page. Chris Calvert has made a really interesting contribution about partnership structures, relationships and accountability on the accountability page.

I've also started trying to make sure there's something on all the pages for the full programme, because I'm going on holiday Monday. Adrian will be sending out the weekly update emails while I'm away.

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Volunteer this

Topics: neighbourhoods, users and citizens, engagement

David Wilcox's blog Designing for Civil Society is really good. In fact, I think I'm going to add it to my regular reads*. I don't know why I haven't already.

He had a great post last week called "How to Kill Volunteer Enthusiasm, Officially"

The UK government has never been more committed to citizen engagement at local level, through policy directives on participation and its plans for neighbourhood governance. But, just as I think participation isn't working and we need a new approach, my friend Kevin Harris offers a reality check in Neighbourhood governance: a top-down burden?.... or "I'm a volunteer, and I'm on overload."

His main point is that engagement is about relationships. Overburdened relationships aren't likely to be the most productive.


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*I use an RSS feed reader - an excellent way to keep up with blogs and all kinds of news. Rather than having to go to someone's website to check their blog - the content comes directly to you. Find out more about RSS and feed readers at IDeA Knowledge.

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public blogging big time

Topic: Public Sector blogging

Tom Reynolds, intrepid ambulance-man and blogger, has published a book Blood, Sweat and Tea based on his blog. He blogs about the every day experience of a first responder in London, and it's really good - certainly on my list of regular reads.

The Guardian published an article today about him today, which looks not just at his blog and book, but at the role of public sector bloggers.

Over the course of three years his weblog, Random Acts of Reality, has rapidly become a must-read chronicle of life as an ambulance worker for both other bloggers and the wider public
>snip<
The blog and the book are dripping with irreverence and wit and, for anyone who has not worked directly for the NHS, offer an eye-opening insight into life on the healthcare front line. Reynolds describes the blog as "kind of the truth behind dramas like Casualty".
>snip<
...Reynolds says, his blog, and possibly other public sector blogs, can and do get to the "truth of what's happening" on the ground. They cut through the "nonsense" of TV dramas and "official" accounts of the NHS that politicians or NHS press officers present. "With more NHS staff blogging, more people will know what it is really like ... and more people will get angry about the things that people should get angry about."
>snip<
...he adds: "It may be a hugely simplistic way of looking at things, blogs as a lobbying tool, but maybe MPs will start reading them. Maybe it happens already."

Perhaps MPs do read blogs. Certainly, at least one minister has one.

Unfortunately, the article, while mentioning that other public sector blogs exist, doesn't mention them, even in the online version. Mr Reynolds - like most other bloggers - is a little more generous and his blog roll (list of links to other bloggers) contains a number of other public sector blogs.

This blog doesn't fit into the genre of his blog, the anonymous or semi-anonymous day-to-day work life of front line public servants, such as an ambulance dispatcher, teachers, parking attendants, GPs, police and magistrate.

Perhaps this blog would be more interesting if it did. Or perhaps you might just snooze away at such entries as:

After over two hours of defending the honour - or at least the administrative time - of local government in a meeting featuring possibly the dryest biscuits in Whitehall, I still had to get out of the building. I narrowly managed to avoid bisection by the swinging glass security panels at the departmental headquarters and made my way to the exit. Alas, my escape was to be thwarted as I found my shoe caught in the revolving door. I nearly pitched headlong into the glass ahead of me as a searing pain crossed the top of my foot. Worse still awaited me, as a Government Office employee turned to catch me jerking my leg to free my foot and my shoe from the revolving trap. I could feel my credibility slip as I limped off to Victoria station.

The IDeA will soon be unveiling its new Communities of Practice platform and it includes blogging software (where you can choose to have some posts quite public and others less so). I hope that more people in local government will take up blogging as a way to share practice and experience.

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PM Partner update

PM partner update

I've been a regular slacker in the update process this week. But here's what's been going on:

There's a new member page: Ed Stevens has written a nice description of the ongoing development of the Wiltshire Improvement Partnership -which includes some of their forthcoming challenges. If you have any advice or examples to share, please do. I've also added some more information about Health Outcomes after my meeting with Ashley Gould from the Welsh LGA. I've linked to some links to their great resources from the Health page and the outcome indicators page.

I've also been getting ready for next week's new topics partnership agreements and structures. And I've been blogging on partnership news which includes some nice examples of practice here.

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Friday funday

The lighter side of local government.

For the birds
Councils are certainly into the business of love (as I posted last week) - what else is a Registry office for? But now they're doing it for the birds.

Gloucester City Council has been matchmaking for a lonely turkey.

Staff at the council-run Robinswood Hill Country Park and Rare Breeds Centre in Gloucester made an appeal after the female turkey became depressed because she had no companion. The search for a pal for Roger even made national newspapers and has led to another farm in the county coming forward with a young stag – the name for a male turkey. Now workers at the park are looking to arrange a date for the meeting and hope the two will hit it off.

I think I know a cure for Roger's empty feeling inside - it's called stuffing.

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Legislative time

You know they say that tasks expand to fill the allotted time. Well, I guess that's true for parliamentary tasks, too. I can't resist a story that makes the link between UK administration and my home state of Tennessee. And this one's a corker.

There's been a national legislative conference in Nashville over the past week and a representative from Scotland attended. He was struck more by the similarities than the differences.

But the one thing that did strike Kellet as weird is that a state like Tennessee, with a population a few hundred thousand people larger than Scotland, could get by with a part-time legislature. He couldn't imagine Scotland doing the same.

...er, wait a minute. Scotland didn't even have a "state level" legislature until 1999 - before that it made do without one for almost 300 years. But maybe they're making up for lost time - after all Tennesseans have been passing laws since 1796.

(Via the US Governing Blog)

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Have a great bank holiday weekend!

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Quick hits: health

Topics: quick hits news stories on public health

Delaying parenthood
Fewer teenage pregnancies in Cambridgeshire and in Gateshead

You might remember the Gateshead programme from the furore over the famous contraceptive jab in McDonald's. But look at them now...

The trust and local council run the Gateshead Teenage Pregnancy and Parenting Partnership, which has now been invited to share its "best-practice" with the rest of the country.

A healthy start
A new health and welfare food scheme boosts nutritious options available for low-income mums. Initially trialled in Devon and Cornwall, it seems to be pleasing recipients, health care providers and retailers alike.

And that's important - as new research shows that childhood obesity is being fueled by "toxic diets".


Healthy bodies, healthy minds

The Department of Health has issued new guidance about improving the physical health of those with mental health care needs. The link between physical and mental health is well established, but there's also been concern from mental health charities that the mentally ill's physical ailments are often overlooked and associated as symptomatic of their mental illness.

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Healthy Wales

Topics: public health, Wales, outcome indicators, performance management, partnership, shared outcomes

Yesterday, my IDeA colleague Sue Crutchley, a member of the Healthy Communities team, and I met with Ashley Gould of the Welsh Local Government Association. They have been doing some really interesting work around performance management in health.

Ashley's view is that promoting health is part of the core business of local authorities. Why grit the roads except to reduce accidents? (health) Why inspect restaurants? (health) Why promote better educational attainment? (yep, health - those with greater educational attainment are much more likely to be healthy and live longer) Bringing in new employers for economic development, but there's a problem with high rates of long term disability? (health - and the population will get healthier, too as the employment rates goes up). Promoting health isn't just about beer and fags, he said. (Grave disappointment to me - as these are my most cherished recreation).

The Welsh LGA worked with all 22 Welsh authorities in a whole programme around health - all of it really interesting. But particularly of interest to me is the work they've been doing on developing a set of shared outcome indicators. A set should be available fairly soon and will provide comparable information for all the authorities and PCTs in Wales.

They also have a range of publications and some quality links for healthy communities, too.

****

It looks like the Healthy Welsh may be joining us in our forthcoming Community of Practice for health. That will be great because they'll bring a different perspective and their own strands of learning. Stay tuned for more info.

****

I learned a new word from Ashley Gould yesterday.

dragonise (drăg’٨nīz) transitive verb
1 To make [par. English] policy and practice more appropriate to the context of Wales
1a To Welsh-up

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When a PFI is a PFI

Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) have certainly come in for a lot of flack over the years - recently I saw a highly critical programme on PFI through Channel 4's Dispatches. Or see this article in The Telegraph by the documentary film maker.

I'm certainly not ideologically opposed to the private sector making money (that's what they do). But I have to admit that I don't always think the public sector has been able to use PFI in a way that maximises the use of public resources. And my ideology certainly insists that public money be spent transparently.

But the LGA has highlighted two examples of where a Private Finance Initiative has become a Public Finance Initiative.

Projects nearing completion include:
• This month Huntingdonshire District Council will officially open a £6.5million new state of the art health centre which the PCT will rent back from the Council
• Wychavon District Council is building a £6.7million hospital and health centre - the 26 bed hospital and GP surgery with 13 doctors will be completed late September.

I think one of the problems of PFI may have been a cultural divide. The private sector is amazed that the public sector is annoyed when they make big profits and the public sector cannot understand why the private sector gets so sniffy about clawbacks. I suppose it's early days, but this might work out really well - there won't be the big cultural divide and presumably both partners can be minded to be more flexible and more open.


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Friday Funday: Still the one

Friday Funday: the lighter side of local government

Shania Twain's You're still the one may not have been a hit for a while, but it still tops the polls of most popular songs played at Cumbrian registry office weddings. See the full top ten - and some of the stranger choices of brides and grooms. Who walks down the aisle to the theme to Jaws?

In other terms of endearment, Newcastle officers have been warned against it.

Colloquialisms such as "pet" and "hinny" have fallen foul of Newcastle city council's policy on equality and diversity.

And onto the business of love... if you think you have the odd dispute over planning. One Chinese local government is facing quite a quandry over the restoration of an...ahem...historic building.

Ancient, decrepit brothel arouses debate in China.

A local government in Jinggang, a town in central Hunan province, must decide whether to restore crumbling Hongtaifang, a brothel established in 1733, and face the ire of residents who see it as debauched, Xinhua news agency said.

One the one hand:

"The brothel was a place where women were humiliated in the old society," Xinhua quoted Xiao Yisheng, a retired university professor, as saying.

But on the other hand:

Tan Feng, a student from Xiao's former alma mater, begged to differ, saying the site was bound to prompt different reactions in different people. "When I entered the brothel, it reminded me that it was a place where the ancients indulged in sensual pleasures," Tan said.

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17 Aug PM Partner update: Risky business

PM Partner update

There have been a couple of new requests for help on the Help Please page. One is about skills for partnerships. We'll be looking at capacity within partnerships as part of this programme and the other is about risk management. When we conducted a survey about the issues folks were most interested in - risk came just about at the bottom of the pile. But risk is an important issue - and there's the risk to delivery as well as risks inherent in partnerships themselves. But it seems to me that it's often adressed in dry language. Why is taking risks often so exciting, but managing risks seen as dreadfully dull?

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collaborative learning and improvement

Yesterday I was in Leeds with a group of other IDeA staff looking at our approaches for supporting collaborative learning. As an agency, we've lead on a number of programmes that use a collaborative learning approach, such as our Accelerated Improvement Consortia, the work of the Planning Advisory Service and the Action Research programme we ran through the Performance Management, Measurement and Information project. The PM Partner project and the IDeA's Community of Practice approach is another way of supporting collaborative learning.

You can find out a little bit more about the Accelerated Improvement Consortia work in Yorkshire and Humberside in relation to street cleansing and neighbourhood governance.

I'm committed to the approach, but we want to make sure that we're doing it the right way. Yesterday's meeting was largely about our own collaborative learning, making sure that we're able to support local government in leading improvement from within.

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being neighbourly

Topics: Housing, Community engagement, co-production

Maybe it's because I've suffered from noisy neighbours (e.g. very loud Polish pop on one side and evangelical karaoke on the other). Or maybe it's because I've been one (rather loud party once a year - country and western). But I found this interesting:

Respect and Housing Management - Using Good Neighbour Agreements

It's a DCLG paper reviewing the effectiveness of good neighbour agreements. Turns out they can be effective and there are some tips about making them work.


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15 August PM Partner update

PM Partner update

Folks continue to add their personal pages to the site. Personal is a bit of a misnomer, since some of the pages are personal (i.e. about someone's skills and roles in partnerships) and some are about organisations, partnerships or practice.

I was able to link across from performance monitoring page (a current weekly focus on the project) to the recently added South Wiltshire Strategic Alliance page for a nice example of performance reporting against community plans at an all area level and smaller community. By sharing interesting local practice, we're all able to learn.

There have also been new comments on the communications page. Should partnerships have a public "persona" - so far the answer is...sorta.

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Partnership news - quick hits

Topics: quick links to partnership news on environment, community safety, and performance management from Hampshire, Fareham BC, Sheffield, Hounslow and Oxfordshire

Join the CREW
Hampshire Constabulary, Fareham Borough Council, partners and the local community are kicking off another CREW - Crime Reduction Environment Week. It's an initiative aimed at reducing crime and creating cleaner, safer neighbourhoods.

Members of the multi-agency CREW team will be offering information and advice to the local community on wide-ranging issues such as home safety checks, youth initiatives and crime prevention.

Throughout the week agency partners will be conducting reassurance patrols and enforcing the laws over such matters as litter dropping and failing to clear up dog foul.

...snip...

Sergeant Roy Jennings said: “I would like to encourage all residents living in this area to go along to the Working Men’s Club, where we are going to be based, to get involved. All activities are free of charge and can benefit individuals and the wider community.

You mean they're not going to charge you to pick up trash by the side of the road? Seriously, it sounds like a great initiative. Blitzing an area to improve the environment and raising awareness among those who live and work there.

Fun ways to prevent fire
Sheffield has come up with a cool way to get across the message about safety and fire prevention focused particularly at ethnic minority communities. Go through the kids. This can be particularly important where children may be the only members of the hosuehold with a good command of English. And what do kids like? Kids like crafts. (Well, I did.)

The Council's Sheffield Council’s City Centre Community Participation Project has teamed up with the Pakistan and Muslim Centre to provide innovative ways of getting across important issues.

Councillor Denise Fox, Cabinet Advisor for Community Safety said: “The aim of the project was to highlight issues around fire safety within the home with children and young people. The young people who took part used the digital art programme created by Shahid Latif as an effective medium to reinforce the message and raise awareness of the importance of fire safety within the community.”

Children who took part in the workshop were educated on the risks of fire in the home and developed their own fire safety messages via a digital art programme. Their designs were further developed into T Shirts that the children took home.

And what did the kids say?

Aqsa Ashraf (age10) said: “It was fun, I really enjoyed it, I have learnt so much, I would like to do it again”
Isaac Ali (age 9) said: “I really enjoyed doing graphic art it was amazing”

Lend an ear, or at least a phone
Hounslow Community Safety Partnership has developed an interesting initiative where old mobile phones can help the victims of domestic violence. Essentially they're turned into mobile alarms that can ring 999 at the press of any button.


Partnering for better PM
I meant to blog about this last week, but anyway better late than never.

Oxfordshire County Council is leading a partnership of 12 Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire authorities that are in line to receive £1m of extra funding from central government in return for working together to improve performance.

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PM Partner update 14-15 August

PM Partner update
This week we'll be looking at two very important topics on PM Partner - communications and citizen and user engagement. How well do your partners communicate with each other, with staff and stakeholders and with the community at large? Are you of the opinion that partnerships shouldn't have a public "persona" themselves (e.g. citizens don't care who delivers so long as delivery is good) or do you think it's important to demonstrate that partners are working together?

Also, engaging with users, citizens or community groups is increasingly important and there's increasingly an emphasis on working with users to deliver better outcomes. How individuals partners harness their own work in engaging users (from consultation to co-production) and bring this experience together for improved outcomes.

There are already some great resources and contributions on these pages, but we need your view, too. You can always find the current topics at: http://pmpartner.editme.com/thisweek


What's your story?
Last week I sent an extra email asking participants to create their own page - we've already had quite a few contributions. Each of them is different, but at the same time exactly what I had in mind. They're about personal experience, interesting practice and organisational approach. You can find them all at the "my pages index" This is a great way of sharing practice and finding out what others are doing, but it will only work if a good number of people contribute. So go on...

One person emailed me afterwards to say how fun it had been. We have full instructions here.
I'll highlight some of these contributions later on today.

Made to measure
We're still looking at the performance measurement and monitoring topic, too. It would be really helpful if you could share your own examples of performance reporting here or on your own page.

Keeping in touch:
You can always find out what recent contributions have been through the daily update.

What's new?
Our policy discussion page has some quite interesting dialogue around the relationship between central and local government and the "duty to cooperate".


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11 August PM Partner update

Guess where I've been all day! I've been learning how to be a better facilitator for the PM Partner project - getting lots of nifty ideas and networking with others who have similar interests, challenges, etc. The IDeA is taking to this community of practice approach in a big way - so all of you PM Partner participants and blog readers can say "Hey, I was part of the start of it all."

Now for the update. Remember yesterday I sent out an email asking people to put up their own pages. Well, they have! Check them out.

Have a great weekend! (Though I know you're probably actually reading this on Monday, so hope you had a great weekend.)

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Friday funday

The lighter side of local government

Where the streets have no name
Folks in Doncaster are getting the chance to choose the name of a new street via a consultation effort run by Doncaster MBC. It seems they've already narrowed it down to short list - all some of Doncaster's best loved sons and daughters.

Deputy mayor Councillor Margaret Ward said: "The new complex is for everyone in Doncaster so we have involved the local community in the major decisions. We want this road to be named after an individual who has had a significant impact on Doncaster, and who better to comment on this than the people who live here?"

Doncaster is a step ahead of some. Long before I was born, my grandfather was an elected member of the local government in the small, rural Tennessee town where I went to high school. A number of streets in the town had no names and the postal service got a little uptight about that. It fell to my grandfather and one his city official friends to name those streets.

Did he engage in public consultation? Not so much. Apparently, he and his mate just drove around town randomly assigning names. Their designations so lacked imagination that I can only remember one of them. And that because of a story told to me by the (then) young son of his city official friend many years afterwards. This young son accompanied them on a naming expedition one day.
"What do you think of that street?" my grandfather asked him.
"It's short," said the youngster.
"Short Street it is then."

And it is...to this very day.



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10 August PM Partner update

PM Partner update:

Today we're trying something different. I emailed everyone to encourage people to make their own pages. In a way this is modelled after my own favourite website (after PM Partner, of course), a community of practice site for people who like to take pictures: www.flickr.com

Just like a flickr account, participants can use pages simply as a repository for partnership links and tools that are useful to them, or people can use pages to tell their own stories about working in partnership, share concerns and ideas and engage with one another. Here are full instructions on how to make your own page, and here's one I made earlier. I hope that just like flickr, people will engage with each other and create a real sense of community.

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9 August PM Partner update

PM Partner update

9 August update: There have been lots of contributions today. In particular I want to highlight the Hull Partnership working toolkit, which Iain Atkinson uploaded to the Tool Box. We've also created a new area to discuss policy around partnership - go ahead and share your tuppence worth!

Adrian added a new page to partnership perspectives section - on local government.
Lots of links to useful resources were added to the site as well on the main resources page, health, users and citizens and assessing your partnership. I also blogged about some new partnership resources here, here and here.

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What's new on Knowledge

Topics: new partnership resources on IDeA Knowledge

A brand new resource on Neighbourhoods, Devolution and Communities including resources on localised services, the role of ward councillors, and a series of case studies.

Health Outcomes in LAAs Although it focuses on London, the lessons could be transferred to any region. A paper developed by the Strategic Health Authority, Regional Public Health Group - London and the Government Office for London highlighting some of their experiences of working together to support the development of LAAs in London.

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Involving people in partnerships

Topics: co-production, partnerships, citizen and user engagement

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published two briefings on engaging people in partnerships. One is about the value of co-production including the potential benefits to public service institutions of using this approach (with some warnings that while the voluntary sector has used it well the public sector might use it to achieve "efficiency") and the other is about the benefits of community engagement in local strategic partnerships. (LSPs).

• Hidden work: Co-production by people outside paid employment
• Active governance: The value added by community involvement in governance through local strategic partnerships

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Quick hits: partnership reports

Topics: links to a variety of recently published reports and resources on partnerships, including: service delivery partnerships, children, housing


The DCLG's Service Transformation through partnership a toolkit for those wishing to develop partnerships for service delivery.

The DfES's Local Evaluation of Children's Service: Lessons from the Children's Fund
This report focuses on exploring four themes: the roles, orientations and principles of local evaluators; the evaluation methods that have been adopted by local evaluations; the ways local evaluations have sought to support partnerships’ decision making; key messages emerging from local evaluators’ reports and the ways local evaluators have sought to understand the underpinning themes of the Children’s Fund initiative, namely, prevention, participation and partnership working.

The Chartered Institutes of Housing's The Costs and Benefits of Groups, Mergers and Partnerships
This study has sought to identify both financial and operational costs and benefits of constitutional and non-constitutional partnerships. It has also analysed the many expectations on the outcomes of merger activity and their effects, including how tenants view moves to merge or form new groupings.



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PM Partner update

PM Partner update

We introduced a new topic - or rather a series of related topics around performance monitoring. Adrian and I add new content on pages relating to health , principles of performance reporting , criminal justice , and data and information. New resources are added to outcome indicators by Lorraine Macklin and Greg Wilkinson made a contribution to the leadership debate . There was also a new request for help on the Help Please page - so if anyone knows anything about strategic partnering around waste management and street services (or probably the experience of strategic partnering in general) please chip in.

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Quick hits: health

Topics: public health, health and social care, user engagement

Eleven councils are participating in a new self-assessment scheme for those with long term health or social care needs

People with long term health and social care needs will be able to assess their own support needs and apply directly for services to help them, thanks to 11 new pilots announced by Care Services Minister Ivan Lewis.

The ground-breaking new projects will explore the scope for enabling people to self assess their need for support from a range of services, such as equipment, home care, standard housing adaptations and low-level preventative services.

I think this sounds really interesting and I hope we'll hear more about this. To find out who the 11 councils are see this story.

So what did they talk about, exactly?
Small changes can make a big difference in young people's lives, especially in terms of health. In Manchester, footballers are talking with young men about sexual health.

In one area of Manchester, there had been 60 reported cases of young women contracting gonorrhoea. Young men were however not being treated for STIs, either because the symptoms were less easy to spot, or because they were too embarrassed to see a doctor.

As a result of face to face advice from Manchester City FC players and staff, over 20 boys were referred for treatment.

More details of this and another case study can be found on the Department of Health website.


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PM Partner update

Update from the PM Partner project

There were some new comments on the partnership perspective page, which prompted me to add a new link on the citizen and user page to a really interesting citizen engagement initiative in Manchester: The Mancunian Agreement. It's really great to hear about new things. Adrian added a link to the Guide to Performance Management in Partnerships - produced by Bracknell Forest Borough Council and London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham on the Resources page and some good links to the weblinks page. There was also a new query on the FAQs page. Please do ask any questions you have. As it turned out, I actually couldn't answer the question in full, but I am now investigating.

By the way, we now have almost 500 people registered with this project, though not everyone is registered to edit this site. WOW! (The actual figure is 496 - so if four of you could tell one friend each...). If you haven't registered to edit the PM Partner site - go here. Imagine what a fantastic resource this would be if each person just added one bit of their own knowledge. You know you want to...

I also began readying the pages for next week's topic - performance monitoring.

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Friday funday: more spray paint

The lighter side of local government

Last week I blogged on consultations about graffiti, policy discussions about what to do with those who engage in criminal damage by tagging, and a new website in Lewisham where residents can report graffiti.

And it's no surprise that sometimes citizens engage with local government through graffiti, but have you ever seen a council replying with spray paint?

Well, now you can.

It just goes to show:
1. there are many creative ways to engage with citizens (some of them more appropriate than others).
2. folks the world over aren't sure which government body is responsible for which service.

And to top it all, this little example of public consultation and community engagement occurred in my own home town. (Please do note the colour of the spray paint - the colours of the much-loved local University football team. Go Vols!)


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Choice and consequences

Topics: health and social care, user choice, risk, trust

Choice is a hot topic. I fundamentally believe that if I'm able to tailor a package of goods and services to suit me best, I'll be better off. I believe that's true for everyone...well, almost everyone. There are some people who seem incapable of choosing wisely, whether for consumer goods or a package of public services. But then again, they probably don't think much of my choices either.

Trust is a fundamental issue in the choice debate. Usually when we talk about the "trust" issue, it's about how much the general public trusts us the public servants, whether we be local government officers, politicians or quango employees. But I think there's another important matter in the trust debate. How much do we as public servants and professionals trust the public? What do we think of their choices? And how much do we wittingly or unwittingly encourage them to choose something else if we disagree with their tastes and preferences. How we can tell if we disagree because their choices are wrong (e.g. leading to the wrong clinical outcome, will have negative impact on themselves or others) or if we find them personally distasteful? It's easy to say that part of the job of the professional is making that distinction, but humans aren't that simple.

There Department of Health is working to develop a tool to help both practitioners and users evaluate their choices. If both parties can understand the risk and impact of various choices, and decided whether they're worth accepting that will go a long way toward supporting choice and engendering a trust that's mutual.

I'm not entirely clear what stage the tool is in development, but it looks really interesting. Here's what the DoH website says:

It is designed to be used by social care staff and practitioners from health who have care management/care co-ordination responsibilities. Service users could also be encouraged to use the tool as part of a self-assessment if they so wished.

Its application can be with any adult from any care group, in any situation and it is designed to be flexible and useful in a variety of settings including residential, supported housing and community teams. It is not intended that the impact assessment will replace other risk assessment processes especially in relation to mental health and safeguarding, where tried and tested risk and care planning processes are in place.

The tool will be tested in a variety of settings by a range of practitioners with a diverse group of service users to ensure it is robust and useful.

If you are interested in holding a seminar contact Caroline, CSIP Risk
Framework Project Lead, on 07979 713 235 or email caroline.godleman@dh.gsi.gov.uk

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Topics: performance management, IT systems

You might have heard of CompStat. It was an approach used by the New York City police department to tackle crime through performance management. The approach is supported by a GIS based information system that help police and the Mayor identify crime hot spots and to track performance - but really it was about regular accountability meetings for senior managers to discuss that performance and identify solutions to tackle underperformance and praise good performance. (Occasionally the approach was criticised for having too much "accountabilty" and not enough recognition).

The City of Baltimore took CompStat one step further and came up with Citistat. This looks at local government performance as well as police performance (in most US cities, the police force is directly accountable to the head of local government). They have a lot of interesting information about their approach on the Baltimore CitiStat website (including new information on how neighbourhoods and even smaller communities can take advantage of some of the tools and approaches for improving quality of life). A couple of years ago, Baltimore's mayor, Martin O'Malley came to visit the City of Westminster as part of a Peer Review team.

The London Borough of Barnet uses the approach, too where it's called FirstStat - though I don't know much about it.

Now councils North of the Border are giving it a try.

From the Scottish Executive:

The Executive set up pilots of the Citistat performance management system in two NHS Boards, Tayside and Ayrshire & Arran, and two local authorities, City of Edinburgh and Aberdeen City. The pilots ran from September 2005 for six months. Findings from the evaluation of the pilots include:

• The model can be adapted to Scotland's public sector and can respond to local circumstances
• The process improves the quality of information and makes it easier to understand and scrutinise that information
• Improved quality of information and regular meetings to scrutinise performance allows active follow up, overseen by senior management, and better results

You can download the report here, which includes case studies from all four organisations.

Story via eGov Monitor
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As far as I know, few performance management systems feature in bestselling murder mysteries. But in Patricia Cornwell's novel Southern Cross a CompStat style PM IT system is an important part of the plot.

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Blogging for case studies

Topics: professionalism, localism

Demos, "the think tank for everyday democracy," is doing some work for us at the IDeA on professionalism. They have a blog. They even have a project blog for that work. And they are looking for some case study examples on local professionalism (and probably also on the changing nature of professionalism).

I’ve been doing a bit of reading for a new project that we are starting with the IDeA, looking at how efforts in local authorities to re-orient services around the needs of users are disrupting professional boundaries, roles and status, and am struck by the suggestion that John Craig makes in the recent Demos collection on Professionalism that we may be witnessing the birth of local professionalism.

...snip...

ps – we are on the look out for case studies for this project, so drop me an email if you are either dealing with issues like this, or know someone who is….

Go and read the whole post.

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PM Partner update

Regular update on the PM Partner project

We introduced two new topics leadership and decision making. There have already been several useful comments on the leadership page. There have been some suggested changes to the decision making checklist which can be found in a mind map - they cover some interesting aspects, such as who holds the power (and what kind) and decision-making culture that I hadn't thought about before. But that's the point of this project - to bring a lot of new and interesting perspectives.

There are two requests for help on the Help Please page, one about performance frameworks in general and one about PM IT systems that can be used for partnership performance management. If you've had experience of speccing a system for use in partnerships, please share your experience on the Help Please page. In response, I did highlight some work on PM IT system guidance done through the PMMI project , but it doesn't really cover the partnership aspects.

There has also been further discussion on the general performance management in partnership page.

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