Community Voices

Understanding communities is key to commissioning great services.

Many Integrated Care Boards are currently co-creating a strategic approach for working with people and communities, following the 10 principles of for working with people and communities (ICB guidance 2021). Doing this work well means listening better, to develop insight and understanding of how best to serve local communities.  This is highly skilled work which requires the gathering of qualitative data on people’s experiences and what matters to them.  

The Point of Care Foundation has been using its expertise gathered through 10 years of working with people’s stories to train and support people living and working in ICB areas, to be able to collect citizen stories, to underpin engagement and co-production across ICBs. This fresh approach leaves ICBs better equipped to engage well with citizens in the future.  

We know the sorts of things that people say are important to them don’t always match well with the solutions normally offered by health and care services. That is why skilling people up to listen better can really help to make commissioning match better with the needs of people and communities.  

Such citizen stories move away from what services will be offered, toward an exploration of people’s needs and aspirations for their health and wellbeing.  They look more deeply into the richness of experiences and what is important to them about their daily lives. 

This programme offers qualitative interview training to staff within the statutory and voluntary sectors, as well as local citizens so that community conversations can be gathered and interpreted, in a safe and rigorous way. This leaves the ICB and partner organisations with a legacy of highly skilled interviewers who can continue this engagement. 

This training delivers   

• An understanding of the attributes of a great community stories interviewer 
• An exploration of the principles of good involvement practice 
• Qualitative / narrative interviewing preparation and practice 
• Preparing people to share their story and keeping them safe 
• Listening to stories and surfacing meaning 
• Managing high emotion 
• Debriefing story-tellers 
• Thematic analysis – making sense of your data 
• Relationship-based practice: the challenges of reciprocity – giving something of yourself 

• Practical challenges – holding the space for conversations that might be experienced  
• Hearing these stories can be hard – getting support for yourself 

Optional extras 

• Train the trainer
• Training others in interviewing skills
• What does it mean to train the trainer?
• What are the challenges in training others?
• Dealing with group dynamics
• Managing conflict
• Hearing all voices
• Managing time
• Achieving a balance between information-giving and experiential
• How to manage professional boundaries
• Practice in developing your own training programme
• Action Learning Set – Alumni are offered the opportunity to attend an action learning set monthly for 6 months post training.

If you are interested in this training please get in touch with us using the form below and we can discuss a bespoke package that’s right for you.