Page 47 - WCEN Dr Rochelle Burgess evaluation report\ Baloon

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Future of the Network
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Future of the Networkk

Participants were provided with the opportunity to identify opportunities and challenges in relation to
the expansion of the network and its co-production activities. Analysis identified three global themes
around this issue: Opportunities, risks and limitations, and ensuring sustainable change. Each are
discussed in turn below.
Opportunities
Statutory and community partners were united in the acknowledgement of the strengths provided by
having a diverse range of partners and actors within the network. This was identified as a route to
increasing opportunities for engagement in communities. Specifically, the presence of strong community
partners, who remained anchored to geographical locations was seen as a key route to riding out phases
of political transition that impacted on statutory bodies. For example:
At any point in time systems change, priorities change. But this doesn’t have to be that limiting,
if we work with communities. Local communities stand the test of time, regardless of wider system
changes, they are always there. – Senior manager – statutory body
The diversity of partners creates further opportunities in the network, such as the ability to mitigate some
of the risks related to expanding community participation in the delivery of care, which has been identified
in literature as a barrier to successful coproduction (Palumbo (2016). Participants from statutory partners
suggested that the network created the opportunity for multiple statutory agencies to share in risks linked
to new programmes. This is an important aspect of encouraging statutory partners in taking ‘leaps of
faith’ in the absence of appropriate evidence around new ways of practice. As one senior executive
within the formal health sector noted:
“We (our organisation) are not very good at being brave, but over time there has been a growing
recognition of the need to assess risk and know that some risk is worth backing....but the
investments need to be wider than just one organisation, so that if things go wrong we can all
take some of that responsibility, and own that. With the increased participation of the local council
in [the network], it’s starting to happen, but not quite there yet” - Senior Management, Statutory
Organisation
New opportunities were also noted around the ability to expand on current successes of the network.
Coproduction around mental health services was identified as the strongest area of work done by WCEN
thus far in terms of actual service delivery, and as such, the clearest opportunity for future growth by
multiple statutory partners:
The things that we’ve done about family therapy and about training people within the local
community with tools and techniques and not just like a day training, this was 20 weeks and they
get a qualification at the end of it, this was really something and I’ve then seen it in action in terms
of how they’re using it and actually, this is a model of which we need to do more of and so I’ve
been encouraging that. – Senior management Mental health Trust

A willingness to expand on this work was linked to emerging evidence supporting not only the value of
the process of coproduction within the family therapy program, but also its ability to transfer as a training
model to a new community – with the Muslim family care network.

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