In this guest blog, Ed Lowe – Co-Chair of the Our Voice co-production group in Nottinghamshire – shares his experience of using Making It Real to help develop Nottinghamshire County Council’s Quality Assurance Framework for adult social care.
To make sure that social care is the best that it can be, Nottinghamshire County Council’s adult social care department has developed a Quality Assurance Framework (QAF). It first came about in preparation for Care Quality Commission inspection, as a way of checking the quality of what is being delivered. It talks about what good looks like, what the council wants to achieve and how it will check how well it is doing.
One thing having inspections in social care has done is to really make me think about the things people set out to do. Are they doing them? Are they not doing them? The QAF is a good way to measure things, to hold us all to account. It’s the glue that holds things together. Having the document gives everyone an impetus to try to make everything work. It’s not about saying that everything is perfect, as it allows people to realise when things aren’t going well and remember that there’s nothing wrong with going back and changing course.
Co-production is now a key part of strategic work in adult social care and so it was natural that the Nottinghamshire Our Voice strategic co-production group were asked to help create this new framework. As a member of Our Voice, I got involved as co-chair of the QAF development group.
When we started to develop the framework, the themes and structure we were using just didn’t feel right to the people with lived experience of care and support who were involved. A lightbulb moment came when we looked at the Making It Real themes and the I and We statements and realised that these gave us a really useful foundation for building the framework.
Making It Real is a fantastic tool. The themes and statements really resonated with everyone involved so we decided to put them at the heart of our framework when defining what good looks like.
I have been part of lots of co-production projects, but this was a piece of work I have particularly enjoyed being part of. I felt that, as someone who draws on care and support, I really helped influence the direction that the QAF was going in and it is now good to see Making It Real at the heart of it. I’m proud of it, it’s one of the best pieces of work I’ve ever been involved in – it’s brilliant!
You only have to glance at the document to see how Making It Real has influenced this framework, it really is at the very core. The framework is a good way of holding people to account and will help to build trust in the authority because we can check that people are doing what they are saying they are going to do. Trust in adult social care nationally is at an all-time low and I think if people can see things are being worked on, then it can give hope.
I think co-production has been key to the designing our QAF. It’s essential to have people involved who are drawing on services, so we can share experiences, provide input on design and language, give feedback, make suggestions, and really be at the heart of every bit of the work.
Of course, with any project you’ll come across challenges to navigate. For example, people will not always agree on everything, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, in fact it can be positive – we all want to find the best ways forward for adult social care and health, and everyone’s perspective is important.
Everybody has to respect one another. We won’t always agree, but we are there for a common purpose, which in this case was to help design the QAF. We realised as a group that if it goes well, we’ll be looking at and working with this document for years to come, and that’s the beauty of it. It can really make a difference.
If you would like to know more about the QAF, please have a look at the dedicated web page on the Council’s public website.
