Community Solutions: Finding the right support

Community Solutions is the partnership work between Outside the Box and Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) that has been developing since mid 2019. The focus is finding practical solutions to many current challenges, including:

• Enabling the community sector to contribute to improving people’s wellbeing.
• Increasing the contribution of local services and activities to the overall provision of health and social care services.
• Creating more benefits for people getting support and their families.
• Ensuring and showing the benefits for communities, including the links to keeping jobs in communities and community wealth building.
• Building the capacity of the Health and Social Care Partnerships (HSCPs) to make this a successful relationship, with good outcomes for their services as well as for the community sector

What they found is that any actions that increase opportunities for contributions by the community sector, or steps to reduce the barriers, are welcome and make a difference. They highlight that:

• No single change will solve everything.
• Each change that tackles one part improves people’s access to the care and support they need also takes pressure off other parts of the health and social care system.
• These improvements often also reduce other difficulties or open up opportunities to improve something else – sometimes aspects of health and social care, sometimes initiatives benefitting people and communities in other ways.
• There could be many more ways for the community sector and formal health and social care services to work together to develop and provide better support, with good outcomes for people. Many of these opportunities could happen quickly if there were small changes in how the public service systems work.
• People in the community sector and HSCPs realise this is complicated (and what some people call complicated and complex). They know that big system changes will take time to reach everywhere, but do not see that as a reason for not dealing now with problems that can be tackled.

To support this work, Community Solutions have produced a range of resources that community groups, voluntary sector organisations and HSCPs can use to support their work. This includes:

• Visual maps to highlight what needs to happen
• Descriptions of the work they’ve undertaken
• What they heard from people in Orkney, Perth and Kinross and East Renfrewshire
• Case Studies

You can find all these resources and more on their website here: https://otbds.org/projects/community-solutions/