Putting Older People at the Heart of our New Strategy

Getting Our People Involved

It could be said that we have a fair amount of expertise in customer participation at Age UK East London.  We have been facilitating Older People’s Reference Groups and Carers Forums across East London for decades. Well attended with a large and representative membership, these groups have had notable impact on local systems, including the complete turnaround of a proposed digitalisation of parking permits in one of our boroughs and the hugely influential survey on the impact of Covid and lockdown on older people in Hackney. 

Historically the chief focus of these engagement forums has been on services and policy external to our own organisation. And, to be very honest, participation practice which looked specifically at our own services had been rather ad hoc, much smaller in scale and predominantly focused on hyper-localised service development.  There had been good reasons for this – lack of resources predominantly – and an internal audit on participation back in 2019 did conclude that the level of engagement was generally proportionate and appropriate.  

A Refreshed Approach

Bringing the clock forward, there has been a huge and welcome cultural shift across our sector and beyond toward increasing the value of the user-voice. As an organisation we have grown significantly and are delivering a much more diverse range of services. Crucially, older people have been telling us they feel disenfranchised from the big decisions being made about their health and social care. Our new Chief Executive, senior team and re-energised board agreed that we needed a refreshed strategy and the views and experiences of older East Enders’ had to be central to this.  

Getting it Right

Having heard many a cautionary tale of participation gone wrong, it became really important to me that we did this right.  Too often I have heard of situations where participants have felt used or that their feedback was not taken genuinely, that they felt the whole exercise had been tokenistic and there was no accountability or ‘you said, we did’ feedback.  I made contact with Lou Boyd at Volunteer Matters who leads a lot of participation work. He made these key recommendations:  

• Prepare the organisation – be clear about where the work will end up, what the final outcome is expected to be and how we expect colleagues to respond. 
• Ensure equitable recruitment, representation, and accessibility to all consultation. 
• Be very clear about objectives and scope of influence from the very beginning  – provide participants with a clear understanding of the Why, What, How, When and Who.  
• Where appropriate, provide proper training, support and reward – give people the tools they need to do the work; consider reward/payment where you can. 

The Plan

Following Lou’s advice, I created a plan to be delivered over 6 months, with the first stage focussed on getting buy-in from trustees and colleagues. This plan was presented at a board meeting and at our all staff meeting with updates scheduled in for key milestones throughout the project. I’m pleased to report the strong support we found across the organisation, colleagues clearly recognised the importance of this work, and we are in the fortunate position to have a member of staff whose focus is on engagement with older people. 

During the second stage we used our existing forums to consult older people about our strategic aims. Armed with colleagues, pens and post-its we discussed three questions: 

• What does aging well look like? 
• What do older people need? 
• How can AUKEL help? 

These meetings were some of the most energised I have ever attended with lots of input and challenge and really postive feedback from participants who were clearly very pleased to be asked and to have their opinions matter. 

For the third stage, we recruited a smaller group of representatives from those forums who undertook a more intensive piece of work. They came together for a day every two weeks over a period of two months to look at all the feedback and comments we gathered in stage two, identifying the leading themes and constructing a series of recommendations which they presented back to the larger forums.  

The Learning 

I am grateful for all the learning this work has provided.  Was my plan flawless?  No.  Would I do things differently? Yes.  Chiefly, I have learnt that participation takes time – much longer than I had planned.  And people need the opportunity and support to develop – it was a tall order to expect people, used to being asked about their personal experiences to suddenly switch to evaluating the views and experiences of others.  That said, I am proud of our achievements and the fact that it has been a positive experience for all involved. 

The group have a final presentation to the board scheduled for February when they will go over the 8 recommendations.  I won’t give an itemised list here – suffice to say they are both specific and comprehensive – but I will share the eighth: 

Older peoples’ opinions and views need to be considered to make sure that services are fit for purpose and reflect their needs. Recommendation: Age UK East London continues to involve older people in the strategic direction of the organisation, with a meaningful commitment to reach out to those who are housebound (or otherwise unreached) and committing to remaining accountable to them.  

And thus our commitment to ongoing involvement of older people in the future direction of the organisation is enshrined.