Weeknote: 28 October to 1 November 2019

Fiona McKenzie
Nov 1 · 4 min read
The Creative Process. The word ‘start’ is written on the left. A straight line leads into a mess of wiggles and shapes before going straight towards the right side of the picture. ‘End’ is written on the right. Retrieved from Student Voices.

Where are we up to?

The first month has concentrated on:

  1. Project setup and preparation
  2. Relationships and logistics — people and place
  3. Milestone 1 — Meeting with all staff to discuss process, hopes, fears, learning from initial workshops and prepare for facilitated conversations

The next month takes advantage of lots of prep and conversations as we:

  1. Have around 10 facilitated up-to-an-hour conversations (see below — Great things)
  2. Do some defining and visioning in our first workshop with staff from across the directorate
  3. Get co-designing the framework for approaches to involvement and engagement with staff, patients and community organisations in our second workshop

Great things

Last week we completed the first milestone. All the team meetings took place. We had great conversations about their work, experiences of involvement and engagement and hopes and fears. Team members talked openly and honestly, and I could not have asked for more. It has been a pleasure to start getting to know everyone.

Also great — we have five calls set up for next week between staff and patients or carers. These facilitated conversations are both the next milestone and a big step in starting to explore and understand what matters to patients and the public in health data analysis, looking at personal health data, and quality of care. Each of these 1:1 calls takes place between a member of the team and a patient or carer. They are facilitated in the sense that I have worked to create space and structure for a conversation that is interesting, insightful and meaningful for both sides. I will be joining each to take non-attributable notes around important themes and to help keep the conversation flowing. It is exciting to be starting on these but we had hoped, and planned, to do more than five (see reflections below) by the end of next week.

Three things we learned / were reminded of this week

  1. Time is precious
  2. It’s important to know what else is going on
  3. Keep focused on the end goal

Something we found difficult

Logistics. Lining up multiple diaries for multiple meetings is no mean feat. There has been a lot of back and forth over the last two weeks to get timings agreed and calls arranged. What we get out of this will be valuable, but it has taken more mental energy and time than I expected. In the process though, we have had some great briefing calls with people willing to get involved in the facilitated calls.

Reflection

When I planned this process, and how we would meet the objectives, I thought about it in a very linear way — we do A, then we do B, then we do C. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a month in, it is messier than that. I realise now I should have thought more about iteration and reflection, about encouraging the parts of the process that might seem daunting to grow slowly rather than being something we do in a week and a half.

It has taken longer to find good people to involve in the facilitated conversations than I anticipated but in the process we have found great people in the most unlikely of places. Staff have been excited by the idea of them but less eager to come forward. I don’t want to push anyone to have a conversation they aren’t ready for…that will not help us do what we set out to.

We are at B (facilitated conversations) but B is not involving as many people as I had planned. Instead of sticking with the plan and moving straight on to C, we are taking a breath to work out whether we might make B continue as we head into C, D and E.

I think perhaps this is something we could do better in citizen involvement work. Firstly, messiness is just part of the game — we are humans after all — and needs to be expected. Secondly, sometimes we approach involvement as a linear process, when in reality, to be meaningful and have the intended impact, it needs to be iterative and reflective.

Questions

If you are someone who gets involved, what makes you want to be involved in something?

What terms do you use to mean the people who use public services? Expect next week’s reflection on this topic…

Disclaimer

This is a work in progress, and does not reflect the final views of The Health Foundation, or the participants. It is posted, in the spirit of weeknotes, to encourage reflection and learning. This work requires the team to participate, to share and shape the outputs. When I use the pronoun ‘we’ it is in this sense.

Fiona McKenzie

Written by

making the world a little more human one day at a time. kiwi migrant. person-in-charge at He Tangata Consulting. stories are my personal reflections. she/her.

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