Devon County Council, alongside our partners in the Integrated Care System, are looking at services delivered in the community - Community Based services (Day services, Enabling, Personal Care and Personal assistants).

The review started from a point of change and pressure within the community services market and May 2023 saw the end of the initial discovery stage.  The Community Based Review is a collaborative commissioning approach enabling stakeholders to be involved in a meaningful way in how we shape the services moving forward.  The first stage of engagement was to develop a simple survey with open questions, to enable feedback on what works well and what doesn’t in relation to our current services.  As part of the stakeholder survey we asked if people would like to be involved in the next steps of the review and we had a really positive response which has enabled us to form a co-design group.

We wanted to ensure that the Co-Design group enabled stakeholders to steer and support how the design process works (who and how we engage and plan the work) and how we could design and shape the new services. The Community Services Co-Design Group has representation from Providers, VCS, Service Users and Carers (although using the co-production approach membership, like all decisions, can be adapted by the group!).  We had our first meeting on the 3rd October where all members got an overview of the programme and co-production training before deciding, collaboratively, how we will get started and plan our work.  We’re now meeting every 3 weeks, finding our feet with co-production as we go! but shaping out some great ideas. 

The group met face to face for the first time on 24^th January, they focused on a planned activity around needs in hope it built relationships within the group and set a positive start for working collaboratively in 2024! Discussion happened around the Market Position around topics such as what is missing, how can we engage further and who could they engage with! 

Jargon Busters -          A learning disability co-productive project

Members of the Co-production Working Group requested a session at the Health and Social Care Group (a sub-group of the Devon Learning Partnership Board). This was so they could talk to people with learning disabilities about Co-production.

Whilst the term was alien at first, group members quickly realised that they were already working in a Co-productive way. Many LD organisations and meetings rely on group members to choose the direction of the conversation and plan agenda items. As the participants knew each other well they were already in the position of being able to safely question what was being discussed, expressing different opinions at times and everyone had the opportunity to take part if they wished.

The group decided to call themselves Jargon Busters as clear communication and removing barriers to access services is very important to them. A plan was requested to map out possible Co-production projects; our first being a film made with people sharing their stories of working in a Co-productive way. There will also be a segment on what happens when people and different communities are excluded or not invited to take part in Co-production.