From little acorns deep roots do grow - Good Scrutiny Awards 2010 winner

Last updated:14 July 2010

In October 2008 a new team came together within Liverpool Council for Voluntary Services (LCVS) to form a Local Involvement Network or LINk for Liverpool. We were four strangers, tasked with establishing something completely new with people we were yet to meet. We could have been daunted by the prospect but instead we saw it as a fantastic opportunity.

Our task was to develop a network to collect local voices that would make informed recommendations to commissioners and providers about improving local health and social care services. We recognised that the model needed to be strongly rooted in the local community and from those firm roots it would be able to engage with local people and statutory services across the City of Liverpool.

Early planting of the concept was not easy as the team were working in a transitional phase with Patient and Public Involvement Forums (PPIFs), each made up of a few selected individuals. That concept of engagement was completely different from our vision, so you can imagine some of the difficulties we had to manage. 

There was fear and scepticism from statutory partners relating to the development of this new network, its specific statutory powers and how the LINk for Liverpool was going to develop. The contract stipulated the creation of an operational LINk by December 2008.  The support team and members remained positive and focused and successfully met this deadline.

The task demanded leadership, compatibility, vision, a good rapport, trust, openness, honesty, creativity, communication, patience and most importantly diplomacy. All of this was crucial to enable us to grow, nurture and develop the acorn to provide the roots to support that tree, known to us as Liverpool LINk.

We promoted the concept within the community and shared the vision with local people to join and have their say to improve services. Instead of looking for individuals who wanted to have their say on behalf of other people, we persuaded people to be interested, like us, in helping others to speak for themselves. This was quite revolutionary and tricky to achieve, because it often required us to convince community activists to give up the privilege of having service providers pay more heed to their individual opinions than to those of the average service user.

We managed to encourage local people and service providers to embrace quality engagement that was based on evidence rather than opinion, collective voices rather than single person commentary and openness and inclusivity rather than just listening to those groups that were easy to reach. The Team designed and delivered training and provided support to develop a network of volunteers that was committed, confident and competent. To reinforce this concept we had to develop a structure that fostered inclusion for all, create and adopt strong governance, clear roles and responsibilities, fair and transparent systems and procedures (including an independent scoring for the issues that presented themselves to the LINk resulting in the identification of informed priorities).

The Team attended many meetings and benchmarked with a number of LINks from across England to enable good practice to be shared and bring the new learning back to the core group for their consideration. Equality of involvement was recognised as a key success factor, therefore it was important to ensure that the makeup of the membership was diverse enough to be representative of the City and its diverse communities, as this would strengthen any reports that Liverpool LINk would produce. We proactively went out to recruit from diverse communities and ethnically monitored our membership.

We had to reassure service providers that this new powerful network would use its powers responsibly and constructively.  So our team wasn’t shy about gaining a public profile for ourselves and the work we were doing. We also involved and engaged with service providers by inviting them to a LINk Together Event where we gave everyone the opportunity to talk to LINk about issues that LINk could work on that would prove popular with local people and useful to the development of local services. During this time we established “Friends of LINk” specifically for those statutory partners who could not vote in LINk but could make a contribution.
 
Our initial success was marked by us having an active LINk membership of 140 by January 2009. We then established Task and Finish Groups up to work on identified priorities including alcohol related hospital admissions, healthy weight and personalisation.

By April 2009 Liverpool LINk had a clear product and buy-in from statutory partners, service providers and its members. Thus we had ensured the establishment of the roots of LINk and developed the core group into the heart wood of the LINK oak tree. We had branched out to the services and to the wider community. We were now ready to branch out into the neighbourhoods. The LINk product was now really going public and a huge marketing and publicity campaign was launched in the form of posters on buses, railway stations, regular local radio slots, formal presentations, meetings and events. The outcome of this campaign saw the branches of Liverpool LINk grow from 140 to 2626 in membership.

To make effective use of this large membership, the Support Team engaged with Liverpool Strategic Partnership structures to pave the way for replicating the LINk model at neighbourhood level. Our new Neighbourhood Champions helped to develop LINk in the Neighbourhoods.

As the LINk grew stronger and issues were identified, community based research was supported by the team, reports were produced and partners recognised their value and some recommendations were instantly acted upon. It was clear to all concerned that Liverpool LINk support team had good practice to share with others and the team have given a number of presentations and master classes to spread the good practice and have shared a Task and Finish research toolkit to assist other LINks.

We enthusiastically continue to develop Liverpool LINk and hope that the lessons learnt will provide an ongoing legacy to improve community engagement and service provision across the City of Liverpool.

Kathy Hull, Local Involvement Network Services Manager, Liverpool Charity and Voluntary Services