A little over two weeks ago I did one of the scariest things I have done all year. I was in the US, with nearly 200 of my peers from the AltMBA, and Seth Godin himself giving a five minute talk. Last week I blogged about my decision to become a Registered Manager. This talk is part of the backstory to that decision, so I wanted to share it here too.
I am getting ‘skin in the game’. I am setting up a new provider, Wellbeing Teams, and I am going through the process of registering with CQC. I will personally be the Registered Manager, if CQC accept me after my interview in a weeks time. I am still part of H S A, and will still be speaking at conferences and working with the team towards the same vision. I now want to demonstrate, in practice, what one-page profiles, person-centred reviews, person-centred teams, care and support planning and Working Together for Change, can actually look like in teams supporting people living at home. My plan is to start in home care, and also look to supporting families and people with learning disabilities, and people using mental health services, as well as within primary care.
Last week I learned that you cannot podcast under a tree in the wind. I was very disappointed when I tried to edit it to the sound of gale force winds and tinny voices in the background. There was just enough sound to create a blog from it, so with apologies to Katie, Andy, and Sangeetha, here are your words rather than you voices. This blog describes how we are starting to introduce a Wellbeing Team into a GP Practice.
Working out how to measure the right things can be difficult. It’s easy to fall into the trap of counting what’s easy and missing what matters. That seems to be especially true when it comes to measuring outcomes, where whatever we measure usually feels like it only gives a glimpse of what’s important but not enough to know that we’ve actually met our purpose.
In the work I’ve been doing recently to create new Wellbeing Teams, I’ve been focussed on finding a way past this problem. I want the information we use in these teams and in support of them, to help us pay attention to the right things in ways that are open and collaborative. Ideally, I want to find ways to do this that are simple and engaging too. Working with Andy from Easier Inc, one of the ways I’ve been exploring how to do this has led to a very unusual use of the word ‘clean’.
“What would Wellbeing Teams and self-management look like in mental health?”
Carey Bamber is my asked me to think about this, and to share ideas through a webinar. Carey is the Policy Adviser and Member Support with the Association of Mental Health Providers. A couple of months later we were sat together in my office managing technical challenges in delivering a webinar on the subject. I shared how Wellbeing Teams were working to support older people at home, and we talked about some potential implications for mental health support.
I am a bit of a quality nerd. I did a masters in Quality Assurance in Health and Social Care at Leeds in the 1980’s. I would enthusiastically tell people about my course to be met with facial expressions of mild disbelief and comments that questioned whether anyone could find QA interesting. Mark Cannon, a colleague from Here introduced me to Andy Brogan from EasierInc, as someone who could be helpful around systems, quality improvement and governance in Wellbeing Teams. I heard that as an opportunity to talk to someone who could be as fascinated about quality and systems as I am. I was right.
I am learning about new models and ways to deliver support to people at home. Over the last few weeks I have been learning about co-operatives and employee ownership and what this could mean for Wellbeing Teams. Wellbeing Teams are a social enterprise, which is a “business that has primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners”.
This week I am looking at community ownership and community businesses, so naturally the first place I looked was Power to Change’s website. The website says that there are four features to a community business. They are locally rooted, trading for the benefit of the community, accountable to the community, and have broad community impact. Here are some ways that I can see how these could apply to Wellbeing Teams.
I am working with commissioners in England and Wales who are taking a different approach to working in partnership with providers to improve care homes. There are three ways that they are doing this, buying membership to The Butterfly Community, investing in Community Circles and using the self-assessment tool Progress for Providers.
My colleague Jackie LeFevre is a values specialist, and part of the Minessence Values Framework co-operative. We have been working together to define and demonstrate values within Wellbeing Teams. Here she shares her thoughts on the values underpinning Co-ops and Wellbeing Teams.
Co-operatives have been around since the 19th Century, and still feel relevant today. I am interested in them because of my work with Wellbeing Teams: both share a common thread of self-management.
There are some exciting co-ops emerging in health and care, and there are three examples that colleagues of mine have established. Neatly, we also think there are three reasons to take a closer look at both co-operatives and Wellbeing Teams.