Reshaping services in Newham: the South Community Recovery team

Here’s an overview of the Reshaping Community Services work being carried out in Newham, in the South Community Recovery team, one of the first pilot teams in this Quality Improvement priority area.

As part of their project, the team were aiming to improve the satisfaction with care provided by staff and received by service users. A project team was formed with a range of staff and service users, who met weekly to drive the work forward.

One of the first things the project team did was to create a driver diagram, to help them articulate a strategy to help meet their aim. This had a range of different change ideas on it, however one of the main ideas they tested was the development of co-production workshops held by staff and service users. The aim of these was to provide an opportunity for staff and service users to come together to meaningfully have conversations about the service and what good looks like.

Here are some thoughts about the team’s co-production journey from team member Jake Fleet, Community Mental Health Nurse with the Ageless Early Intervention Service service based with CRT South:

“The development of the Co-production was uncharted territory and posed issues strangely far more basic, yet far more difficult than expected. Just the general running of the group, setting agendas, path of conversation and what we wish to achieve from the time were all questions that took far more time and thought than anticipated. It works differently to anything else I have worked with within the Trust… As staff we arrived sure we knew what was offer within Newham and confident in our knowledge of them. Once the session begun it only took a matter of minutes to know we knew just a small portion of what is on offer for a person in Newham, we could of developed a catalogue of groups within this session of which staff before had knew little of. The conversation was lively, the ideas of how as a service we could use these groups flowing and contributions heavily led by the people who knew the topic, not just people with lanyards on. This for us was where we realised how effective Co working could become. Within a matter of minutes you could brainstorm ways of improvement from multiple perspectives with an immediate focus group for feedback, whether that be staff or patient groups.”

If you are part of ELFT and want to learn more about this project, please visit Life QI – Project code: