Citizen Advisors - Turning Point

Turning Point Connected Care Report 2
Foreword
The future of public services depends on starting from the citizen’s perspective,
shifting power to communities, and opening up services to individuals in different
ways.
Communities have a role in achieving good outcomes from public services. We
also know that some communities need extra support to access services, and
often don’t receive support they need because they find it difficult to navigate their
way around services.
This report recommends a different approach, provided through Citizen Advisors,
to support people to interact and engage with services, and to build up their
resilience and community capacity.
It brings together and appraises the international evidence-base of citizen advisor
type functions. There are good examples of services performing different aspects
of these roles: but most have struggled to meet the challenge of both having the
confidence with the local community, and also providing a sufficiently strong and
acceptable mechanism for working with other professionals across public
services. Our vision is for Citizen Advisors to help people access the variety of
services they require to meet their needs. Citizen Advisors can help assess,
signpost and support people into local programmes while enabling them to
interact more effectively with services when they exercise their option for self
directed support and personal budgets.
Thus it is an approach which could help bring life to the Big Society ideal of giving
more opportunities for local citizens to come together and solve problems that
affect their lives and their community. Their grassroots knowledge can also
support the coalition government’s plans for Liberating the NHS with communities
acting as more active participants in public services.
At the heart of Liberating the NHS is the aim of opening up services to patients in
an unprecedented way. Its proposals focus on providing greater choice of
providers, choice of treatment and more transparent information on the quality of
local services. This ‘choice and information revolution’ makes the role of Citizen
Advisors essential if people are to navigate their way around the health service
and truly experience the best it has to offer.
Citizen Advisors could play a critical role in brokering the new relationships the
government is seeking to establish the relationship between health, social care
services and communities. There are a number of approaches that would support
this process. One solution would be for Citizen Advisors to support GP-led
consortia so that both GPs and patients know more about the range of local
services and community resources that might be available. A second approach
would see Citizen Advisors linking health services to the wider community to help
ensure more equal health and wellbeing outcomes are experienced across
different social groups.