A familiar, difficult and critical issue came up at our Healthwatch development group recently. Basically: 'it's great having all you people round the table – we've accepted any offers of interest – but at some point we'll need a much smaller group that can move quickly and take decisions.'
There was no hidden agenda here, but it immediately set alarm bells ringing. At the moment I'm involved: I'm at the heart of the action so happy to contribute my thoughts and my time. If I'm not in that inner circle I won't be up to date with the latest thinking, I won't know if my ideas are useful and I'll be an outsider – why should I bother? Healthwatch (and lots of other bodies and partnerships) need input, in this case volunteer input, so keeping this wider group of interested parties engaged and bought-in is crucial.
It's the same problem that comes up time and time again – LSPs, Health and Wellbeing Boards, almost any local partnership – we want to involve a wide range of stakeholders but we need a small steering group. How do we ensure all the district councils can input to the HWB? How can we get buy-in from a wider range of voluntary bodies?
There is no simple, single solution, but there are answers. Here are a few possibilities:
Open up the steering group meetings
make them public and encourage key stakeholders to come along
possibly webcast meetings or at least provide meaningful and accessible summaries of what went on (not just formal minutes)
if webcast, take questions and comments electronically (twitter, email, via a website) in real time
allow non-members to contribute to meetings. This could be someone with a special interest or expertise attending for a whole meeting or a vacant chair that visitors could bid to take, on an ad hoc basis so as to contribute to the meeting
Use sub-committees, task and finish groups etc. to engage people. These need to be supported by good, two way communication and not simply be top down – the sub-group doing the steering group's bidding. The sub-groups need a real role, which could include a degree of implementation.
Engage broader groups of stakeholders in other events. Annual events were used by many LSPs, but there could also be monthly events for more interested stakeholders.
Maintain constant two way communications with stakeholders. Email newsletters, online forums, social and other events, can all keep people involved.
Does anyone else have other suggestions?
Although not complicated, none of this is necessarily easy to make work in practice and is easy to let slip. And it needs resources. Which means it needs people to contribute their time to make it work, whether work time or voluntary. And to get that, you need to involve people. So, a potentially virtuous circle. I've tried to illustrate some of these dependencies in this diagram on strategic issues in establishing local healthwatch.
