The People Powered Results team worked in partnership with NHSX to design, test and rapidly deploy a range of mechanisms to listen to those at the frontline of our healthcare system, and find out how they were rapidly adapting to working in a crisis environment whilst maintaining the delivery of key services.

The team set out to help NHSX to start to identify and understand:

• People’s experiences of shifting to new (digital and remote) ways of working during the start of the pandemic.
• The challenges and anticipated barriers to sustaining new practices.
• Emergent good practice, that can be built upon beyond the initial crisis.

The team gathered learning and insights about what digital transformation happened during the early days of the pandemic and what helped and hindered this.

Themes included: Operational issues such as policy, resource flows and governance; Technical issues like access to hardware and the confidence and skills to use digital/remote tools; and Cultural elements such as collaboration, mindsets and new behaviours to support a shift to digital.

These insights from the frontline informed a series of recommendations to NHSX to shape their support to the system, build upon emergent good practice and mitigate risks and blockers.

Working in partnership with Midlothian Council, the People Powered Results team applied a ‘Listen and Learn’ approach to engage with staff from across the council ranging from social workers, refuse collectors, teachers and maintenance staff. Their insights have helped to develop an understanding of:

• Their experiences of living and working through the initial months of the pandemic.
• How people adapted and innovated, and the new ways of working that emerged in response to challenges faced.
• What Ideas and recommendations people had for the future.

The learning that has emerged has helped to shape a series of recommendations about the future ways of working for Midlothian Council which cover the following five themes:

• Valuing community
• Remote/flexible working
• Digital first
• Leading new ways of working
• Education

The Council Leadership are using these insights to develop an ambitious sustainable approach to co-designing their future with staff and communities, building upon and shaped by local assets and resources.

COVID-19 has forced everyone to consider and reflect on dying, death and bereavement in some shape or form. The pandemic has also acted as a catalyst for significant change and innovation across palliative care and end of life experience.

In response, Nesta, Marie Curie and St Christopher’s have been working in partnership, seeking to build a picture of what has changed during the pandemic and identify ways in which we can all contribute to better experiences of dying, death and bereavement in the future.

Over the summer, our work was focused on understanding the policy context and technology landscape through desk-based research and a policy review. We also gathered insights through a series of conversations with 55 people working across health and care, the voluntary and community sectors, local and national leaders, as well as a number of people with lived experience.

Our approach culminated in hosting an open event online in September 2020, bringing together over 150 people with a broad range of perspectives and experiences to:

• Make connections, and share experiences of recent events.
• Explore opportunities to reshape future experiences of death, dying and bereavement together and think creatively about what a better version of the future could look like.
• Identify what we can do together and who we might connect with to create momentum and support us along the journey ahead.

We are in the process of summarising the insights gathered through this initial phase of work, to be shared on our web pages later in the Autumn of 2020.

Nesta’s People Powered Results team and PPL have been working with Waltham Forest London Borough Council to co-create a progressive strategy for their Families Division.

To retain the best of their work to date, unlock the expertise within the system and capture real-time learning from their COVID-19 response, we used a range of methods to involve over 100 people virtually in the strategy’s development.

With a commitment to collaboration and co-design, place-based and whole-systems thinking, the strategy development process involved people from right across the system, from leaders and directors to managers and frontline practitioners.

This strategy is being developed to support the families division in Waltham Forest London Borough Council in navigating a time of significant change and challenge and in working in new and exciting ways to support their residents.

It is setting the foundation for a brighter future, one where Waltham Forest as a whole is more resilient, and where everyone has an equitable chance at a good life where they are safe, well, independent, resilient and connected.

The global health crisis saw many of Nesta’s grantees navigating extremely complex circumstances. As organisations they were thrust into uncertainty and faced immediate demands: from rapidly adopting new ways of working, adapting their delivery models, and strategically thinking through their new medium-long term plans to find solutions to tackle the crisis. The People Powered Results team worked with Nesta grantees to:

• Identify and consolidate learning based on how they adapted services/programmes in response to COVID-19.
• Build a shared understanding around innovative ways of working that emerged as a result of the crisis
• Plan recovery and future strategies based on their learning.
• Create spaces to reflect on what they were facing and the solutions that would move them forwards through the health crisis in a proactive way.

We offered a blend of different support, ranging from building internal coaching capacity through to external coaching, facilitation and content sharing. As a result, we were able to develop bespoke offers based on each grantee organisation’s needs.

Overall, we provided 1:1 support to individuals from five grantee organisations, designed and delivered six virtual workshops, and worked with three grantee organisations to formulate recovery plans and scale up innovative practices that emerged during emergency response. This included supporting:

• The Cares Family to evaluate their re-invented programmes at the start of lockdown so they could adapt and scale these.
• Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice to reflect on their learning from lockdown and start adapting future strategy.
• Shout Out UK to reflect on their learning and new ways of working as a team in response to COVID-19.

As COVID-19 took hold in the UK and many people and organisations began to realise just how much this was going to affect every part of our lives, PPR in Greater Manchester started to carve out online spaces for open conversations with local partners to help process what was happening, culminating in the hosting of a Civil Society online conference.

During lockdown organisations and communities found themselves rapidly adapting to organising volunteers, supporting food banks, connecting with neighbourhood hubs and the emergent ‘mutual aid’ movement.

Through the Civil Society Conference, we wanted to bring representatives from across the statutory and Voluntary and Community Sectors to share learning, provide a space to reflect, and start to look to the future.

A number of key themes emerged that that will continue to remain relevant as COVID-19 continues to influence our lives :

• How mutuals and the voluntary sector can adapt and thrive with changing roles and new pressures.
• How to influence the broad agenda including adaptive Leadership that enables a culture of shared power and permission to innovate and ‘try out’ new ways of working.
• How to support more sharing of resources and mutual, trusting relationships.
• How to change culture, framing and language by crafting common strengths based discourse to influence decisions about policy, commissioning and practice.
• Learning together about community activity including small business, who else is doing good things.

The COVID-19 health crisis provided a rare moment in time when people in communities and across complex systems had a clearer sense of the needs of others and, for many, the power of their own individual role in a collective response to the crisis. The HARP Sprint tapped into the human spirit’s curiosity to continuously test our assumptions about what is possible and explore how innovation can leverage human ingenuity.

The HARP COVID-19 Sprint was a time-limited, experimental innovation project, based in Wales. The aim was to inspire and support arts and health professionals to develop new creative activities that could help to mitigate some of the negative impacts of the pandemic on peoples’ health and wellbeing.

Y Lab and the People Powered Results team convened 12 arts and health professionals from across Wales to work with people from four distinct groups:

• People with pre-existing mental health conditions and brain injury survivors in the community.
• D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists.
• People experiencing loneliness (often with pre-existing health conditions).
• Older people shielding and isolated from younger relatives.

Taking a people-powered approach in the HARP Sprint

We supported Y Lab to build the right conditions, structures and support online that would enable teams to collaborate and rapidly experiment with new ideas and new ways of working in a digital landscape. From ways of working to idea generation to storytelling, online activities were designed to unlock individual and collective creativity and drive change forward. The ability to apply tried and tested existing methods in effective ways online meant the Sprint was able to rapidly harness people’s innate curiosity and create a space to spin ideas into action.

Drawing upon a range of our methods, tools and frameworks, The HARP Sprint connected people online through creativity and created the space for innovation, ultimately creating better outcomes for people.

We are continuing to partner with the Personalised Care Group within NHS England to bring the ambitions of personalised care to life for citizens, practitioners and systems across the country.

This builds on the actions and vision laid out in the Long Term Plan. It continues a long legacy of our partnership through Nesta’s focus on People Powered Health, Realising the Value, and Integrated Personalised Commissioning. Here our work has helped to build the evidence base, support rapid adoption of personalisation across systems, support collaboration between local and national systems, and co-develop national guidance.

Our current work is focused on:

Peer Leadership:

We are supporting the Lived Experience team in NHS England to support people with experience of personalised care to develop their knowledge and skills to step into positions of peer leadership. The aim is to enable many more people to have a stronger voice in their local area, to effectively collaborate with the system and drive change, and ultimately improve the experience of personalised care for others.

We are partnering with them to co-design a new remote learning and support offer, and are working with a number of contexts across the country to explore:

• How they can practically support peer leaders to take action within local and regional health and care systems to undertake strategic coproduction.
• How they might develop the skills and capabilities within local areas to grow and facilitate strategic coproduction on an ongoing basis

London Vision:

We are supporting the London region to co-create their vision for personalisation.

This work is bringing together clinical leads, STPs and Integrated Care Systems across London, alongside regional and national representatives to help build a shared vision and energy around the future of personalisation.

This includes identifying immediate and future needs and opportunities for people and communities, both through COVID-19 and well into the future, and exploring the role of personalisation in reducing inequalities and improving outcomes for the population.

Peer Support:

We are currently leading an insight-based approach to “Listen and Learn” engaging with a wide range of stakeholders to better understand approaches and variation in the implementation of peer support.

This builds on previous work undertaken in partnership with Nesta and NHS England focussed on generating evidence, detailing best practice, and practical considerations. For example: Realising the Value, and guidance under the Integrated Personal Commissioning programme.

However, the adoption of, and access to peer support still varies – geographically across England. It is more readily available for some groups than others, and commissioning and referral practice can be very variable.

It is also recognised that the COVID-19 Crisis has required different ways of working, with a shift to digital delivery of services. Therefore, this is an opportunity to understand the impact to peer support and the needs of people during the transition from recovery and restoration into the ‘new normal’.

As such we are conducting a number of interviews, with a diverse range of people from voluntary sector providers, to commissioners, to people with lived experience, public health and social prescribing link workers. This is aiming to explore and understand the enablers and barriers to implementation, as well as the need to sustain and spread peer support. This will also consider the role of NHS England in shaping support to commissioners and providers.