If the process of consultation and engagement is to be useful for all involved, the processes need to be carefully planned.
You may decide, as good practice, to measure your performance in consultation and engagement. The National Standards for Community Engagement have been developed to encourage best practice by providing targets against which to measure performance. Which standards should be given most attention will depend on both the character of the engagement and on the experience of the agency and community partners involved, but discussion of their importance should be a priority from the start.
These guidelines have been designed as a practical toolkit, to guide you through the whole process of engaging with people in the planning and delivery of your services. The guidelines provide a number of useful links to other resources/organisations that will help you to plan, implement and follow up your activity. There is also a project plan checklist that you can either view as text only or print and complete as you go along.
The guidelines have been developed from:
In addition to these guidelines, learning opportunities and consultancy to assist you is available through the Community Planning Support Team. Please contact the Policy Unit on 01595 744537, policy@shetland.gov.uk or write to Policy Unit, Town Hall, Lerwick.
NHS Shetland staff who use these guidelines
should seek further help and advice from Assistant
Director Patient Services (01595 743033) or any member of the PFPI steering
group.
NHS Shetland has developed an additional tool, designed to compliment these
guidelines, which may be more suitable for smaller health care orientated projects.
A primary element of engaging and consulting with communities is the ongoing work of many practitioners with communities to increase their ability to express their issues and problems and to find ways to resolve them pragmatically. There are many examples of this and it is important to recognise the importance of this in the work that you are about to undertake: to use local knowledge and expertise in the way that you develop you’re methods.
Consultation and engagement is important because it develops and sustains working relationships between one or more public bodies and one or more community groups. It is designed to assist both of them to understand and address needs and issues experienced by the relevant community or communities.
Communities are diverse: communities based on geographical areas and communities based on different groupings and interest groups within society. Thinking about ourselves as individuals, we all belong to a number of different communities.
It is good practice to involve as many people as possible in the decision-making process: to ensure that as many people as possible have been able to express their views and feel that their views have been taken into account and weighed against the views of others, when decisions are made which affect them.
With the complex make-up of Shetland’s communities, it is therefore just as complex to involve as many of them as possible, who wish to be involved, in the process. It is important to recognise this: to develop a multi-faced approach to gaining views and to move away from simple forms of consultation to working at relationships and engagement and ongoing dialogue with communities.
Many terms are used to describe public involvement in policies, programs and decision-making processes. Consultation expresses the idea that an agency, group, community or individual is going out to seek advice from someone else. It implies a purpose driven process in which someone takes the initiative to seek advice. It does not necessarily imply anything about what will be done with that advice when and if it is received.
The more service users are able to participate in the process of planning and delivering services the greater their satisfaction, and the greater the reward to the service provider! Participation simply means the act of participating, in whatever form. People can participate by writing letters, ringing up, attending events, sending emails or using a host of other forms of communication. Participation is very similar to involvement – the act or process of being involved.
Engagement goes further than participation and involvement. It conveys the idea that people’s attention is occupied and their efforts are focused on the matter at hand – the subject means something personally to someone who is engaged and is sufficiently important to demand their attention. Engagement also implies a commitment to deeds not only words. So it is possible that people may be consulted, participate and even be involved, but not be engaged.
For clarity, consultation does not encompass exercises whose aim is either to inform people of a decision already made or to persuade them of the merits of such a decision. Such a process would constitute a one-way communication exercise that does not require feedback through a consultation process.