A report examined literature and practice around service-user involvement in social work and social care, and the extent to which service-user involvement had brought improvements. Differing priorities and unequal power relationships between service users and professionals were a key barrier.
Source: Developing Social Care: Service users driving culture change, Knowledge Review 17, Social Care Institute for Excellence (020 7089 6840)
Date: 2007-Nov
A new book examined the theory and practice of 'co-production' – a model of social care in which users of a service played an active and participatory role in the service provided to them, adopting a working partnership.
Source: Susan Hunter and Pete Ritchie (eds.), Co-Production and Personalisation in Social Care: Changing relationships in the provision of social care, Jessica Kingsley Publishers (020 7833 2307)
Links: Summary
Date: 2007-Nov
The Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 was given Royal assent. The Act was designed to tighten partnership arrangements between local councils and other public bodies, and deliver closer integration of health and social care. It placed duties on councils and named partners to co-operate in drawing up and having regard to local area agreement targets. Partners included primary care trusts, youth offending teams, police authorities, and local probation boards. Existing independent local patient and public involvement forums would be abolished.
Source: Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007, Department for Communities and Local Government, TSO (0870 600 5522)
Links: Text of Act | DH press release | NHS press release | Involve press release | Community Care report
Date: 2007-Oct
A report said that the National Health Service was still far from being patient-centred, and the key future challenge for reform was to engage patients fully in managing their own care and treatment. Funding and reforms had brought almost no improvement to patient engagement in the previous five years, therefore failing to secure important benefits for health outcomes and for the future sustainability of the NHS.
Source: Nick Richards and Angela Coulter, Is the NHS Becoming More Patient-centred? Trends from the national surveys of NHS patients in England 2002-07, Picker Institute Europe (01865 208100)
Links: Report | Picker Institute press release | BBC report | Guardian report
Date: 2007-Sep
A report gave a comprehensive assessment of the government's efforts to create a patient-led National Health Service. The need to listen to and communicate better with patients was an area that the government had repeatedly committed itself to act on, and was a fundamental part of its reform strategy: but good intentions were not always delivered in practice.
Source: Sheila Leatherman and Kim Sutherland, Patient and Public Experience in the NHS, Health Foundation (020 7257 8000)
Links: Report | Health Foundation press release
Date: 2007-Sep
A new book examined the challenges involved in enabling people who were 'experts by experience' to participate in developing health and social care services and in social work education.
Source: Mo McPhail, Service User and Carer Involvement : Beyond good intentions, Dunedin Academic Press (0131 473 2397)
Links: Summary
Date: 2007-Jul
A think-tank report examined ways in which public services could better engage their users, based on examples of best practice in the public and private sectors.
Source: Sophia Parker and Simon Parker (eds.), Unlocking Innovation: Why citizens hold the key to public service reform, Demos, available from Central Books (020 8986 5488)
Links: Report | Summary | Demos press release
Date: 2007-Jul
A report examined what was known about participation in social services by users and carers, and how evaluations were being conducted. It suggested ways in which individuals, groups, and organizations could develop measures to evaluate the effectiveness of participation.
Source: Mark Doel et al., Developing Measures for Effective Service User and Carer Participation, Social Care Institute for Excellence (020 7089 6840)
Links: Report
Date: 2007-Jul
A report examined the importance of the 'user voice' in public services, and how to create the right conditions for its expression. The more connected people are with public services, the more likely it was that user voice could help improve those services.
Source: Richard Simmons, Johnston Birchall and Alan Prout, Our Say: User voice and public service culture, National Consumer Council (020 7730 3469)
Links: Report
Date: 2007-Jul
A report called on all public service providers ? voluntary, private, and public ? to put users at the heart of their organizations and turn policy into reality. Reform had focused too heavily on targets, and a cultural change was needed to listen and learn from the voices of consumers.
Source: Karen Day, From Rhetoric To Reality: Engaging users in public services, Future Services Network (020 7269 9339)
Links: Report
Date: 2007-Jun
The government responded to a report by a committee of MPs on patient and public involvement in the National Health Service. It said that its aim was for user and public involvement to be a mainstream activity - one which health and social care commissioners, providers and regulators perceived as a powerful means by which services would be improved to meet the needs of local people.
Source: Government Response to the Health Committee?s Report on Patient and Public Involvement in the NHS, Cm 7128, Department of Health, TSO (0870 600 5522)
Links: Response | MPs report
Date: 2007-Jun
A report examined whether new local authority governance mechanisms promoted local involvement in public services, and voluntary/community organizations' readiness to respond, particularly in 'hard-to-reach' populations. Policy-makers had added a number of governance mechanisms and structures to encourage engagement, without stopping to consider how they related to one another, or the complexity that this presented to the public.
Source: Marilyn Taylor and Stuart Wilks-Heeg, Localism and Local Governance, Economic and Social Research Council (01793 413000)
Links: Report | ESRC press release
Date: 2007-May
A report by a committee of MPs said that patient and public involvement had the potential to play a key role in both the National Health Service and social care services, by bringing about service improvement and improving public confidence. But there was a danger that the new local involvement networks would attempt to take on far too much and undertake work which was best done by others.
Source: Patient and Public Involvement in the NHS, Third Report (Session 2006-07), HC 278, House of Commons Health Select Committee, TSO (0870 600 5522)
Links: Report | NHS Confederation press release
Date: 2007-Apr
A think-tank report said that the approach by Welsh local government to citizen interaction in public services was a strong model for the rest of the United Kingdom.
Source: Anthony Brand, Devolution and Divergence: Comparing English and Welsh approaches to citizen-centred public service delivery, New Local Government Network (020 7357 0051)
Links: Report
Date: 2007-Mar
Date: 2007-Feb
A report examined the present and future of involvement in health - including the wide variety of activities going on in the public, private, and voluntary sector to involve patients and the public in the National Health Service.
Source: Edward Andersson, Jonathan Tritter and Richard Wilson (eds.), Healthy Democracy: The future of involvement in health and social care, Involve (020 7632 0120) and NHS National Centre for Involvement
Links: Report | Guardian report
Date: 2007-Jan
An article reported on a systematic review of the empirically based evaluation literature relating to patient and public involvement in health services.
Source: Norma Daykin, David Evans, Christina Petsoulas and Adrian Sayers, 'Evaluating the impact of patient and public involvement initiatives on UK health services: a systematic review', Evidence & Policy, Volume 3 Number 1
Links: Abstract
Date: 2007-Jan
An article examined user involvement in public services. Far from enabling the delivery of high-quality integrated services that truly reflected the interests of existing and future users, these policies represented the further commodification of basic human needs and welfare.
Source: Stephen Cowden and Gurnam Singh, 'The ?user?: friend, foe or fetish?: a critical exploration of user involvement in health and social care', Critical Social Policy, Volume 27 Issue 1
Links: Abstract
Date: 2007-Jan
A survey examined people's awareness, knowledge, and motivations towards citizen governance roles. ?Citizen governance? in itself was a term that was not clearly understood by the participants, nor was the concept fully understood. Governance roles were perceived to be undertaken by people who tended to be well educated, articulate, ?well to do?, and who had time on their hands.
Source: Douglas Dalziel, Emma Hewitt and Lucy Evans, Motivations and Barriers to Citizen Governance, Department for Communities and Local Government (0870 1226 236)
Links: Report
Date: 2007-Jan
An article by the Secretary of State for the Environment said that users of public services should be empowered not only by being given individual choice, but also by allowing communities to express their collective ?voice?. It was also necessary to look at empowering citizens in the market place, by giving them the information needed to exercise ethical or environmental choices to strengthen their local social networks.
Source: David Miliband MP, 'Power: a new agenda for the left', Public Policy Research, Volume 13 Issue 4
Links: IPPR press release | Table of contents
Date: 2007-Jan