A clinical commissioning group in east London wanted to foster a vibrant health and wellbeing service offer led by the voluntary sector. I helped them clarify their goals through engagement with the community and launch an award-winning Innovation Fund.
The client for this project was a Clinical Commissioning Group responsible for procuring health services for a population of about 300,000 in east London. They wanted to set up an Innovation Fund to tap into the voluntary sector's grassroot knowledge of community needs and assets and support a vibrant health and wellbeing service offer.
I led the team that helped them clarify the Fund's desired outcomes, set out their investment strategy, design and run the selection process. The Fund was a success. My team supported its replication the following year and ran a learning programme for investees aimed at enhancing the impact of investments. The Fund went on to win a patient experience award and it is still running today.
The CCG Clinical Boards had been identifying their funding priorities for the year and wanted to engage community representatives to test them and identify 'sweet spots' where the Fund's investment might create synergies between clinical and community-led interventions.
My team and I designed and facilitated an engagement workshop aimed at co-defining the aims of the Fund.
At the end of the conversation clinical leads and community representatives both felt they had gained a deeper insight into each other's perspectives and identified together key levers to amplify the impact of services in the community. There was convergence around priority themes and concrete ideas had been surfaced, which would inform the design of the Fund and its promotion with community organisations.
"It felt good to think openly together about ideas to improve service provision and to further the good work of organisations in the community"
Lee, Community leader
"Today was eye opening. We don't often have the opportunity to have a direct dialogue with community organisations and then we are surprised that we do not understand each other..."
Susan, Clinical Director
Drawing on the themes emerging from the engagement workshop, we worked with a steering group including clinical and operational leads from the CCG and representatives of community organisations to define the Fund's objectives, target audience, selection criteria and process and a plan to measure success.
It was clear that the biggest opportunities for the Fund to stimulate synergies and lay in:
Once the key pillars of the Fund had been agreed, my team and I worked swiftly to design the selection process, assessment criteria and application forms. In partnership with the CCG we defined a comms strategy for the Fund.
We liaised with key community stakeholders to raise awareness of this upcoming funding opportunity and to test our messages and approach.
We Launched the Fund through a Community Event aimed at offering networking opportunities as well as providing inspiration by showcasing innovative services from elsewhere and methodologies like design thinking.
Over the two months that followed we coordinated the running of a simple but comprehensive and transparent selection process working hand in hand with the CCG team to build their capacity to run a similar process in the future.
The Fund awarded £400,000 to 12 organisations supporting projects across the Fund's four priority areas. We set up a monitoring and mentoring scheme matching members of the CCG to funded projects to hold projects accountable and ensure that learning and impact would be directly visible within the CCG so that successful project may have a direct route to scaling through mainstream commissioning.
Investment was committed for a second year running and my team and I were asked to support a second round of the Fund. We took stock of learning from the first round by talking to the CCG, funded projects and unsuccessful applicants.
We supported the CCG in clarifying their priorities for the second round of the Fund, encouraging them to take steps towards their goal of mainstreaming successful services. We offered light touch support to implementation as the CCG team took a more active role in managing the selection for the second Round.
We persuaded the client that a more structured approach to capturing and sharing learning and impact across projects was desirable and designed a year-long learning programme bringing investees together to share lessons learned and identify opportunities for more and better joint working with statutory services.
The Fund was nominated and selected for a patient experience award in 2017. It is still running.
I never cease to be amazed by how simple and yet powerful it is to use the tools of design thinking to convene conversations that break the patterns of usual interactions. Community representatives brought their assumptions and some strong judgements on local services with them as they came in for our Engagement Workshop at the beginning of the project. Over the course of the workshop we managed to turn these into ideas, which fuelled and guided the vision for the Fund.
Persistence pays off. We tried to make the case for investing in learning already in the first round of the Fund, but that did not fly at the time. After the first round, we were able to persuade the client that a learning programme would provide opportunities for commissioners to follow the impact of their portfolio and for funded projects to make connections that could enhance the value of the Fund's investment.
Drop me a line at fcignola@gmail.com
