Building better neighbourhoods: Changing the way we deliver our services

This post is written by Daniel Wanwright, a Portfolio Lead in Camden’s Supporting Communities Strategy Team; and Naoise Boyle, Design Lead in Camden’s Strategy & Design Team. This is the first of a series on Camden’s neighbourhoods approach to services. You can read the second post here.

In Camden we want people and place to lead the way, empowering local people to live a good life and access local services that work for them. To achieve this vision, we are undertaking a big shift in the way that we work so that our services are local, connected and based on strong relationships with our communities.

Over the past few years, we have held a range of conversations with residents in Camden through our citizens assemblies and other forums, to understand how we can better meet their needs and what they would like to see from local services. These conversations have highlighted a range of key priorities from our residents — Telling their story once & recognising individual needs; more support for vulnerable residents; health services that are an active part of the community and improved support for community organisations. Hearing these priorities from the community has given us a strong mandate to deliver the change that people want to see.

This change isn’t only for Camden’s residents. We also need to support our staff to work in more relational ways with the people that need their help, collaborating with other staff to solve the right problems. In delivering this change, Camden’s staff have been coming up with new ideas for how our services can work more effectively together to deliver better outcomes for the people they serve.

This all represents a radical shift in how we deliver services — organising our work around our neighbourhoods and putting people at the heart of that change. In this post, the first of a series, we introduce how we are exploring local, joined-up support, building services that are responsive to their community and connected into other organisations that deliver for local people.

A national shift

Camden has seen a dramatic increase in the volume and complexity of support needed over the last 15 years, at a time when our funding has steadily reduced. Like many local authorities, we’ve recognised that the way we deliver services and work with our communities must change in response. New policy directives have signalled a growing mandate for community-based care and a focus on local solutions.

For example, the Department for Education have supported Camden and other local authorities to set up local Family Hubs to provide comprehensive support to children and young people from pre-birth to adulthood.

Meanwhile, in the health sector, following the Fuller stocktake report on the NHS, a new strategic direction has been set focusing on three big shifts: Moving more care into the community, focusing on shifting from treatment to prevention and analogue to digital. This is aligned with a shift in the national landscape toward more community-based care. At Camden we want to be part of supporting that change.

Camden’s Neighbourhoods Approach

So, what are we doing about it?

As we test our new approach, organised around neighbourhoods, over time we will build services that embody four characteristics:

Local, joined up support:

This change focuses on hyperlocal, integrated services to provide support for a range of different needs. Working together locally means that services can be much more dynamic and responsive to the needs of local people. This means that communities can link into holistic support instead of needing to interact with different services separately.

People leading the change:

In a neighbourhood approach, local people and staff are enabled to design the change they want to see. We’ve been working closely with staff to design a range of locally appropriate changes to our services to make sure that they are led by the people who know best on what communities need. This has been coupled with our community activation work, bringing the voice of local communities into local placemaking.

Services responsive to the needs of the community:

Local services can adapt and shift to the needs of people more flexibly and responsively than centralised services. While there is merit in keeping some services centralised, decentralised services enable a more relevant service offer to be delivered. For example, in the Kentish town area of Camden there is more need for physical support from our social care service. By understanding this local need we can better design provision to be more responsive.

Connection into community based organisations:

Working in a neighbourhood provides a small enough scale to enable people working in different parts of the system to get to know each other. Community based organisations can be networked into the council’s offer so that there is more synergy between the VCS sector and council services. Developing these relationships is absolutely central to the work — they provide the connective tissue that enable us to work better together within communities.

What we’ve learned so far

So far, our neighbourhoods work has focused on two main priorities: co-locating teams in Camden’s neighbourhoods and building a strong and connected VCS network. We’ve started this work in Kentish town, which has been the first big step in creating an environment where a range of services, working together, can organise around the needs of the community.

To do this we have developed two new neighbourhood teams — East Camden Housing & Community Services, and the East Camden Integrated Health & Care team. Alongside this we’ve also developed five Family Hubs, which build on our pre-existing children’s centres and bring together a range of family and children’s services in one building.

Supporting collaboration between services

To realise more connected and collaborative housing and community services we have co-located a range of teams, from housing officers to repairs and community safety. This means that for example, neighbourhoods housing officers can collaborate better with repairs on the same cases to reach a quick outcome for residents.

Similarly, in the health space, we have just launched the East Integrated neighbourhood team which brings together NHS GPs with Camden’s Adult Social Care and other core health services setting up the foundations towards preventative health services embedded in our communities.

In both of these settings, we’ve found that relationships matter more than structure for great collaboration. Building those relationships takes time and investment, and needs to be resourced properly. For Camden a neighbourhood “orchestrator” has been a critical part of our success: someone who convenes partners, facilitates collaboration, builds relationships, and thinks strategically about how to better serve the neighbourhood.

We know how interdependent health and housing are on each other — damp and mould is a driver of health problems; and residents with mental health challenges are more likely to find themselves in need of housing support. It’s clear that there is huge potential in connecting across services, not just collaborating better within them. By focusing on Kentish Town we have been able to start build connections across health and housing. For example, we have started to test a range of referral pathways with our social prescribers that aim to link up support between housing officers and health staff.

Shifting power to staff

A neighbourhoods approach means providing more agency and support to frontline staff. Research from the Nuffield trust shows that “for integration to thrive, system leaders will need the courage to devolve power to frontline teams, if truly creative solutions are to emerge.” To provide staff with more agency to create change we’ve been testing out a different approach by shifting to a collaborative design approach and testing devolved neighbourhood budgets. These changes have enabled staff to take more ownership and control of both improving services and using Camden’s resources to resolve issues for residents quickly.

Building a strong VCS network

Supporting our priority of working with our community organisations, we have grown a network of over 90 local organisations. Together they form “Kentish Town Connects” a partnership of voluntary and community organisations and active citizens, who are working together to shape the future of Kentish Town. As part of our work to strengthen and grow the network, Kentish Town Connects ran their first summit this summer, bringing together 70+ community leaders to connect, collaborate, form new and develop relationships and think about what local people love and want to improve in their neighbourhood.

We’ll be writing about all of this change and learning more in future posts, so stay tuned!

Building the path to better neighbourhoods

Realising our vision for Camdens Neighbourhoods will mean big changes in how we deliver our services. But it can’t stop there. For people and place to lead the way, we need to radically rethink how we give our residents the power to shape where the places they live and support the wider ecosystem of voluntary and community organisations that are already doing great things in the community.

Over the next few articles we’ll be diving into the detail of how we are making this shift and what we have been learning along the way. But if you want to get in touch to learn more or give your thoughts on how we are approaching this, feel free to reach out to Daniel or Naoise on Linkedin. We’d love to share our journey with others.