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People and Communities Solving Together
by Gillian Driscoll, Community Mobilisation Lead at Solving Together
Hi I’m Gillian, as a newbie to the Solving Together team, I’d like to introduce myself. I usually work in the Public Participation team at NHS England, leading on the learning and support offer for people working in partnership with people and communities. I am loving the opportunity to learn more about the Solving Together programme approach and its ambitions. I now live and breathe it! I’m constantly looking at ways we can reach more people to get involved.
As you would expect from my background, I am interested in how Solving Together involves people and communities; not only how it reaches wider audiences but also how it delves deeper to work with people who aren’t fully represented, either in experiencing the worst health inequalities or people who aren’t yet part of the existing Solving Together community.
My work so far has been looking at the stage before the crowdsourcing starts. I’m interested in helping to create the right conditions through engagement strategies. There are great examples of the Solving Together team and programme teams working together with people and communities, with lived experience partners and with subject matter experts, to shape the challenges for crowdsourcing and then subsequently, to expand, test and spread big ideas.
One underpinning engagement principle which has significant impact is the way in which communities are brought together to be involved. It isn’t about Solving Together developing a new community; it’s about mobilising those who know the most (those receiving care and those delivering it) to give those communities a way to share their ideas and contribute to improvement together.
I’m looking forward to being part of bringing together communities for future challenges. Please encourage your communities to sign up to the platform so they can find out more when a new challenge is announced and get involved.
This post was edited on Jul 19, 2023 by Gillian Driscoll
Comments (2)
Hi Gillian
Thanks for this interesting and insightful blog. Completely agree on the need to be delving deeper to work with those experiencing the worst health inequalities. How will you go about doing so?
Beth
Hi Beth. Thanks for your comments. Part of the planning stage before crowdsourcing goes live is developing an engagement strategy to think about "the crowd." We want to ensure we have breadth and depth and reach those communities who are under represented, have quieter voices or are experiencing the worst health inequalities. We do that in lots of different ways depending on the people we're working with. Some examples include working with people and organisations who are already involved with communities, having seperate focus groups and conversations, workshops to explore the challenges, etc and its all captured in an engagment plan for that programme. Hope that helps to answer your question. Gillian