Commissioning to Facilitate Community Building & Development

According to the book, “Asset-Based Commissioning: Better Outcomes, Better Value,” asset-based commissioning is an approach that enables communities and people, along with organisations, to become equal co-producers and co-commissioners while making best complimentary use of every asset, via self-help, to enhance individual lives as well as community outcomes.

The 2010 report, “A Glass Half Full” by the Local Government Association (LGA), suggested that commissioning should come up with approaches to facilitate community building and community development, and world-class commissioning should:

• Be in line with the initiatives that focus on wellbeing and place-shaping
• Promote involvement at the population-level, not just in the commissioning process, but also to decide the activities to be commissioned
• Facilitate co-production of health care with 3rd-sector users and organisations
• Consider ways to invest in long-term outcomes and measure outcomes.
  

Three individual ‘policy strands’ in social care, health and community development have facilitated these proposed changes with varying degrees of success.

On a continuum basis, commissioning should be shifting to services based on people and community assets from services based on organisational assets as we continue to face challenges to co-design, co-deliver and co-assess services with communities. There are signals that show that commissioning management organisations are ‘asset aware’, i.e., they are capable of utilising the assets of communities and people to change or enhance an existing service.

However, in several areas, a top-down approach that makes use of statutory services as the commencement point is still being considered – which reflects a consultative, instead of co-produced approach. This calls for a change, where services are re-engineered as per the availability of resources in communities, while maintaining an ongoing adjustment with the identification of new assets, to make sure that the services support what is available and being developed.

According to the U.K. Ministry of Housing, Local Communities and Government, there is a consensus on the common hurdles to asset-based commissioning that involve:

• A short-term focus
• A top-down approach
• Siloed working
• Transactional decision making, and
• Inability to leverage additional funding.
  

Such hurdles have constantly been identified in national assessments of integrated social and health care. Short-term funding cycles to complete particular projects restricts the ability to establish longer term partnerships in statutory and voluntary sectors, which is additionally limited by the practice of working in silos within different sectors. While the integration of social and health care has promoted cross-sector association significantly, developments on budget-specific integration has been slow-moving.

Essentially, progress should be made on the basic modifications in the world-class commissioning model. Commissioning has conventionally been based on a ‘market and state paradigm’ that arranges services in line with professional specialisms; for instance, social or mental health care. Classifying services in this manner entails that people’s issues are defined on the basis of particular requirements and resolved by experts, which can effectively limit recognising the person as a specialist. Professionals describe the elements and results of every service and commissioners create the specifications and metrics of accountability.

Here’s is the annotated commissioning cycle which explains the processes that are required to be incorporated into a commissioning cycle.

• Insight: Commissioning management organisations look beyond service data to create a detailed picture of how resources can be used in the most effective manner.
  
  
• Planning: Commissioners co-produce the framework for outcomes as well as measurement approach with people, and work with providers to build their capacity to co-produce and create awareness of social action, while taking decisions on procurement and funding.
  
  
• Delivery: Commissioning management ventures track environmental, social and economic value, collect insights to adapt and enhance services with time, and co-produce assessments of the services with people who use them.
  

These characteristics are typically mapped onto a procurement and planning cycle that showcases commissioning for statutory services. There are indications that commissioning plans are starting to adopt all-in, individual-focused perspectives and a life-course approach, instead of solely concentrating on particular conditions.

Here are the five steps a commissioning management venture can follow to become more asset-based:

1. Shifting the Focus: Shift your thinking from simply considering services as assets to a place-based approach that aims to build and shape communities’ and people’s assets and that involves the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector.
   
   
2. Recognising People’s Contributions: Instead of considering organisations as the sole producers of results, acknowledge that outcomes are attained by communities, people, and organisations in collaboration.
   
   
3. Sharing the Decision-Making: Instead of organisations consulting communities and people prior to taking decisions, ensure that communities and people are equal decision-makers from the beginning and throughout the process, with considerable investment in community groups to facilitate the same.
   
   
4. Developing Relationships: Instead of keeping organisational suppliers at arm’s-length, the commissioning management venture should work towards collaborating strongly with organisations while considering VCSE entities as co-commissioners.
   
   
5. Commissioning Processes: Instead of being majorly centralised, devolve commissioning to the lowest scale possible to enable decision-making at the neighbourhood level.

Commissioning with an all-encompassing focus today requires to involve the concept of responsiveness – recognising that many people will experience sea changes during the course of their life.

In a nutshell, commissioning must be aligned with the support networks, developed by communities to a greater extent, and should consider ways to dedicate funding for the maintenance of local networks.