Partnership Working

Anthony Douglas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134385171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Public Health, Administration & Care

Partnership working is recognised as the most effective way of improving social care services, and a non-negotiable part of the government's aim is to provide a seamless care service. However, for students undertaking placements or for more experienced professionals moving to a different service area, the question is: what does it mean in practical terms?

This book is both an introduction and an in-depth analysis of partnership working across the public sector in the UK. In a comprehensive discussion of partnership working, Anthony Douglas explores:

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• The history of partnership working, its theoretical base and practical applications

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• Why partnership working is important

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• How professionals are already working together

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• How to develop good partnerships and address common difficulties

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• How to ensure that partnership working really does result in better practice

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• The future of partnership working

The analysis and examples range across the whole of the public sector with a primary focus on social care. Drawing on up-to-date research evidence and using plenty of practical examples and thinking points, Partnership Working will be of interest to students and researchers at all levels and practitioners and managers of front-line services.

1 A rationale for partnership working

Key messages

• Partnership working is likely to be a major public sector paradigm for the next 25 years
• Partnership working can be an inspirational framework for people who use services and professionals alike
• Partnership working is not a magic solution for complex social care problems
• Despite its ubiquity, partnership working can leave participants confused about its purpose and unclear about their role, without clear leadership, guidance and support
• At the end of the day, partnership working is the only public policy show in town which has the potential to successfully address the big issues of our times such as social exclusion

First, the definition

The P word

Partnership working is a key twenty-first century concept with multiple meanings yet still with no commonly understood definition. ‘The quiet revolution of joined-up working’, conveys the way in which partnership working is now obligatory throughout the public sector, more through expectation than a set of legal requirements (Crawford 1997). Partnership working has become ‘the main vehicle for policy implementation across a broad range of activities’ (Balloch and Taylor 2001). Every new government strategy, from animal health and welfare to road safety, majors on the P word. The vast majority of new services or projects, whichever level of government starts them, or whichever the sector, will include one or more partnerships. Partnership working is non-negotiable without that being explicit. In social care, Joint Area Review (JAR) recommendations are always made to a council ‘and its partners’, highlighting their joint responsibility and accountability. A similar framework will be used in new Comprehensive Area Assessments from April 2009. The requirement to work together is now written into virtually every new policy, procedure, job description and person profile throughout social care. For example, ‘Understand what “multi-agency working” means for you and your work environment’ is a key section of the Children’s Workforce Development Council’s Induction Standards for all professionals working with children young people and their families (CWDC 2006).

The public sector is packed with consortia, shared services, collaborations, trusts, merging organisations, voluntary shared membership agreements, coalitions of organisations forming to campaign on specific issues, and mutual assistance programmes. However, like Plato’s forms, partnership is a theoretical concept which is often over-simplified in the manner of Woody Allen, when he was asked what Tolstoy’s War and Peace was about and replied, ‘it’s a story about Russia’. Many of the new organisational arrangements for partnerships are becoming as complex as the social problems they have been set up to solve. In other words, they have the potential to become ‘the undefinable in pursuit of the unachievable’ (Powell and Dowling 2006).

The more complex it is, the more likely it is to need a partnership

Having said that, partnership working is not – and should never be – a service or an end in itself. It is a process and a mindset, one outcome of which may be a better service. Its relevance to and prevalence in social care lies in the complex nature of social care problems, which usually require the input of many people and agencies working effectively together. As Peter Beresford has said, ‘Social care is not rocket science. It is much more complex and subtle than that’ (Beresford 2005).

The expectation of partnership holds true at every level. Each social care case will involve a partnership between professionals and one or more people who use services. Today’s social worker or care manager is part advocate, part safeguarder and part resource controller. She or he will have to discuss an individual service user’s needs with many other people, all of whom may have their own perspective to add. For example, to set up the smallest care package, a care manager may still need to talk to the contracts team, finance team and brokerage team inside their agency.

The outcomes of a single social care intervention can be stunning. T, a child from Malaysia, in the English care system and unable to return home, was able to be placed with good family carers in the Philippines due to the flair and diligence of a manager in The Adolescent and Children’s Trust (TACT) and a social worker in a West Midlands Council. These two professionals worked together for months to achieve a successful outcome for that child. In another example of partnership working which improves lives, two single parents, each with an eight-year-old child, share a house and jointly foster a child. A teacher who also lives in the house shares in the child’s care, as does the child’s mother who visits from time to time. Shared care has moved from the margin to the mainstream in many families, and families in the care system are no exception.

In fact, the only way in which the state can ensure that more than one million vulnerable children and adults in the UK every year receive enough support, is by mobilising the wider UK population to become involved: as professional staff, as informal carers, as formal carers – and by promoting a stronger sense of society and collective responsibility. Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, ‘there is no such thing as society’ holds true in as much as the homogenous ‘traditional’ society in the UK has largely disappeared – witness the decline in membership of social institutions like political parties. But this rallying cry to the small-minded ignored the existence of new organisations and communities within the UK, many of which have grown in strength and purpose in the intervening years, like social networks and some churches, whose membership is increasing as a consequence of the search by citizens for meaning in life.

‘Working together’ : as close to a definition as it gets

No two words convey the essence of partnership working as clearly as ‘working together’. The words are simple to say yet much harder to do.

Working Together, originally the title of Government child protection guidance (DH, Home Office, DfEE 1999), and the headline phrase in many government initiatives since, has come to mean:

• Effective communication and action between practitioners, and/or between practitioners and people who use services plus their families and carers to achieve a common goal.
• The development of structures and systems such as case conferences, case reviews, core groups, strategy meetings and information-sharing protocols, all of which are intended to deliver better outcomes.
• Close and effective collaboration between agency managers facing a common problem, collaboration which can take a number of forms, such as a joint service managed by one partner agency on behalf of both.
• A particular focus on the reduction of harm, or the risk of harm, or the promotion of health and well-being.

Stating the obvious, working together means not working in isolation from other professionals and people who use services. It means always working as part of a team: partnership is essentially teamwork with a fancy name. As the then chairman Lord Sainsbury said to a group of trainee managers in Sainsbury’s, one of whom is now a social care manager I know, ‘You’re a team. TEAM equals Together Everyone Achieves More’. Being able as an individual to work as a member of a number of teams simultaneously is a pre-requisite of effective partnership working. To paraphrase Norman O.

Working together, supporting together

On a visit to a local Cafcass team, whilst waiting for a team meeting to start, a practitioner came up to me and said, ‘Nice to see you again. Do you remember me?’ After naming various places I had worked, to each of which he said ‘’fraid not’, I said, ‘I’m really sorry, I give up’, to which he replied, ‘You were my social worker’. He had been one of my first cases. I had helped him, his brothers and his mum. They were children in need, and young carers some of the time. ‘You took an interest in us’ he said, ‘and took us to a Spurs game, then for something to eat’. Being an Arsenal season ticket holder, this clearly went beyond the call of duty! I am not sure how many times I visited the family to offer help, but it was probably not that many. The meaning of the story is that for some people who are vulnerable or isolated, to feel respected and supported by somebody means a lot, even if that professional feels that they have not been able to do much at all.

Brown, professional polygamy is not just desirable, it is essential (Brown 1990). Having said that, teams are only performance-enhancing up to a point. It is individuals who provide the bulk of social care services, and they do this whether or not they work in teams. It is the relationship between the individual practitioner and the individual service user that lies at the heart of social care services (see Chapter 3).

Partnership working lies behind most great achievements. The political philosopher John Rawls said that individual achievement is a myth and any individual success is due to the efforts of many others and of society as a whole by supporting, helping and providing resources to that individual (quoted in Bateman 2006).

Partnership terminology – some definitions from the field

The endless variations in the definition of partnership working can be illustrated by the overlapping terms used within drugs work (National Treatment Agency 2005).

• Partnership work: can be defined as organisations with differing goals and traditions, yet needing to work together (Home Office 1992).
• Joint working: involves drug services developing working relationships with other drug-related organisations or services to ‘help establish the broadest range of seamless service delivery’ (National Treatment Agency 2002).
• Shared care: the joint participation of specialists and primary care practitioners, especially GPs and pharmacists, in the planned delivery of care for patients with a drug misuse problem, ‘informed by an enhanced information exchange beyond routine discharge and referral letters’ (Department of Health, 1995).
• Integrated care: an approach that ‘seeks to combine and co-ordinate all the services required to meet the assessed needs of an individual’ (Effective Interventions Unit 2002).

Moving the goalposts – by widening them

Voluntary organisations have traditionally been creative and progressive, delivering demonstration projects for newly identified needs. Often, the small projects and partnerships they set up to meet these needs go onto become mainstream services. One example is the research partnership between Save the Children and Women’s Aid which resulted in the publication of Safe Learning, the first resource guide about the social and educational needs of children and young people affected by domestic violence (Mill and Church 2006). The broader focus of this individual research partnership has helped professional staff across agencies build up a stronger knowledge base about the needs of children and young people facing these pressures, and through that to make more rounded assessments of the needs of children growing up in households with domestic violence. These wider considerations now form the basis of routine assessments for children in private law cases under the Adoption and Children Act 2002 and the Children and Adoption Act 2006. In this sense, one of the core functions of partnership working is to add to the knowledge base about a social issue with several dimensions, and to seek to widen the remit of statutory agencies to take into account those dimensions.

‘I can swim but not yet’: a parable about partnership working

A Director of Children’s Services, visiting a primary school, sat down to talk with a five-year-old girl. She was proud and enthusiastic about what she could do. She said ‘I can draw. I can get my own breakfast. I know the way to school. I can swim. I can read big books’. The list went on. The director congratulated her, then moved on to speak with the boy next to her. After a short while, the girl tapped him on the arm and said to him with a thoughtful expression, ‘You know I said I can swim? Well I can, but not yet.’

Vague or loose descriptors for partnership working need to be made as specific and detailed as possible, to avoid misunderstandings between professionals, or with people who use services, about what will actually happen in practice. Expectations of partnership working can easily translate into expectations of joint services which may never materialise.

Working together, joint working, or partnership working – the terms are for practical purposes interchangeable – are the heart and soul of modern social care services. They stand for a civilised and civilising relationship between a state and its citizens.

Some urgent reasons for partnership working

The need for collaborative advantage

Without a compelling set of reasons to start and persevere with a partnership, it will probably fail, given the other competing priorities and constant pressure those at the heart of every partnership face. It must add value and convey ‘collaborative advantage’ that offers more than any one person or agency can achieve by themselves (Huxham and Vangen 2005). Generally speaking, if the need for partnership working is staring you in the face, go for it. If it isn’t, be very careful. Don’t be seduced by the rhetoric. This rule applies to seemingly straightforward joint working arrangements as well as major partnership programmes.

Falling between stools

Steve is 33, single, out of work and depressed. He has no formal skills or qualifications. Several nights a week he gets drunk at a town centre pub, and then starts picking fights and assaulting women. He is often arrested but just as quickly released, and is on the edge of custody daily. Two psychiatric assessments concluded he is anti-social and vulnerable, but not mentally ill. He also falls outside adult social care services’ eligibility criteria. The police are frustrated that, as they see it, no agency is ‘doing anything’. A residents’ action group complains to the local newspaper in a similar vein.

Convening an inter-agency review is important as Steve’s needs may suddenly escalate to the point where he does warrant help. Effective communication between professionals is vital with someone like Steve who may pass through several ‘revolving doors’ in the course of a week. An incident log can help, maintained by a lead agency, in which every incident is reported so that a trend or sequence can be mapped and understood, perhaps before it is too late. Steve needs a ‘lead professional’ or care manager who receives all information about him, analyses what is happening and has the delegated authority to mobilise help when it is needed, which is likely to be during a crisis.

The single greatest, or main reason for partnership working is that no single professional social care worker or agency can by themselves and in isolation delive...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 A rationale for partnership working
• 2 The changing context for partnership working
• 3 Who are the partners? Part 1: Social care partnerships
• 4 Who are the partners? Part 2: Broader partnerships
• 5 Building and supporting a partnership
• 6 Partnership working in practice
• 7 Effective partnership working
• 8 The future of partnership working