Over the past few months, and as part of our work as one of the Realising the Value programme partners, we have been working to build and strengthen the evidence base for person- and community-centred approaches in the UK. With a still-emerging evidence base, and in support of the NHS Five Year Forward View vision to develop a new relationship with people and communities, it is now more important than ever that we focus on gathering good examples of why and how these approaches “work”.

We are currently consolidating all the available evidence and over the coming months we will be developing an economic model and practical toolkits for each of the five areas of practice.

These tools will support policymakers to better understand the likely impact of these approaches at a local and national level, in order to facilitate implementation and greater adoption across the country. At the same time, we hope these tools will help commissioners and practitioners to understand the potential of these approaches to improve health and wellbeing outcomes, NHS sustainability and social value. In order to create a robust and useful economic model, a large and contrasted pool of evidence is needed (among many more factors). This is why we are building the economic model from the current evidence base that the programme has developed in collaboration with the Institute of Health & Society, Newcastle University. As discussed in the report, we understand that the evidence is still emerging, with  good data for some areas such as peer support and self-management education, and more apparent gaps for other areas such as asset-based approaches, where evidence is still maturing.

This is one of the many reasons why, for the past few months, we have been engaging and co-producing the evidence base with local partner sites for each of the areas of practice. We have spent time with the sites to understand their ways of working and document their positive stories/outcomes, so that the evidence gaps can be filled with successful frontline practice examples. This was also a great opportunity for us to get through the data and get to a much deeper level of understanding; through our workshops with each of the sites, we got a much deeper understanding of the cadre of enthusiastic and brilliant colleagues and “change agents”, learned their journeys and got inspired with their success stories.

Through these detailed workshops and follow up sessions, we have mapped the key outcomes, costs, outputs, and overarching themes across areas that could benefit the development of the economic model. Also, we have learnt how some sites have developed their own innovative outcomes measurements to monitor wellbeing and specific concerns to users (e.g. the MyCAW measure for Penny Brohn UK), while others applied standardised scales (Peer Support using SWEMWBS). All observed satisfyingly positive improvements on mental wellbeing.

Working with local partner sites has allowed us to  fill some of the gaps for those areas with maturing evidence. Positive health behaviour changes were accurately monitored for some of these areas for sustained periods of time and for broad demographics, allowing further thinking on sustainability of outcomes.

Over the next couple of months, further engagement with consortium partners, advisors, experts, commissioners and local sites will help co-produce the economic model and toolkits, and guarantee the robustness and validity of them (please share your interest with us below if you are a commissioner or policymaker who would like to participate in this co-production process). The findings from the economic model and the tools for commissioners will be published as part of a final package of findings and resources from the Realising the Value programme in autumn 2016, helping to make recommendations to decision makers to support the case for change for these approaches to scale up and become common practice nationally.