What are Local Involvement Networks (LINKs) ?
LINks will be independent networks of organisations and individuals representing the views of local people, to help improve and develop health and social care services.
LINKs will exist in every council area and their job will be to listen to the public and pass on what they find to NHS Trusts and Social Services departments.
LINks will be made up of members of the public. Local people can become involved at any level they choose; from governing members to just giving their opinion about something.
The government have taken a strong view in recent years that the general public should be involved in, and allowed to voice their opinion about, how health and social care services should be run. For the last 5 years this has been through Patient and Public Involvement Forums. Every NHS Trust was legally required to have one and they have been very active in shaping health services.
However, the law has now changed and the responsibility for ensuring that the public voice is heard about health and social care services now sits with local councils.
Each council is now required to select a local organisation that will host an independent Local Involvement Network (LINk). Every Local Involvement Network will be created by the public. The members of the public that want to be a part of a LINk will decide how each is formed and run. Each one will be different depending on where each is based, the type of community that it serves, the numbers and types of people that want to be involved in running it and what the health and social care issues are that face those communities.
The organisation that is selected to ‘host’ the LINk in any given area will help the interested people in each LINk to set themselves up, provide advice and support, assist with practicalities and help them to get in touch with the right people to ensure they are addressing the issues they want to address.
The role of each LINk will be to talk to and listen to local people in lots of different ways to find out what they think about health and social care. They will collect this information and work with health and social care organisations to improve services based on what people have said. They might want to publish results of their work to the public locally or nationally, they may want to work intensively with a particular group of people about a particular issue or they might visit health and social care premises and report their findings. It will be up to local people to decide what their LINk does, how it does it and what it does with the results.
The legislation to create LINks formed part of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill that received royal assent in November 2007. LINks are financed by the Department of Health and local councils have a statutory duty to make contractual arrangements with a ‘host’ organisation to set up and support the LINks. The contract period will be for 3 years, commencing 1 April 2008.
In Bournemouth, Poole, Dorset and Torbay Help and Care have been contracted as the host organisation and we will be responsible for the establishment, maintenance and support of the LINks in each local authority area.
Help & Care is a registered charity working with older people, carers and communities for 22 years. From its very beginnings in 1985, all of Help and Care’s work has been underpinned by classic principles of Community Development, working alongside people to develop and articulate their aspirations, views, needs and concerns.
This gives us an invaluable grounding to become a LINks Host organisation that will support the involvement of local people in commissioning, procurement and scrutiny of health and social care services as well as direct involvement in service delivery.
Help and Care is extremely pleased to have been selected as the host organisation for the LINks in Dorset, Poole, Bournemouth and Torbay . We will begin work to help local people to develop their LINk in each area from the 1st April 2008.
As the host to the LINks in Dorset, Poole, Bournemouth and Torbay our job is to help each LINk to make sure that we include as many different people in as many was possible in each community. We will work with each LINk to ensure that they all have a website that means people can take part on-line in lots of different ways.
We will also ensure that people know about each LINk and that information about the LINks is widely available. We need to make sure that we get information out to people in all walks of life. We will also employ staff to talk to local people about the LINks and about issues that affect them.
It is likely that it will take several months for a LINk to be created in each area as there is a lot of work to do to make sure people know what it is all about and how they can be involved.
The people who wish to be very involved in setting each LINk up will need to decide together what form each will take. They may decide on an elected committee that is answerable to the wider general public, they may opt for more of a coalition approach. They may decide that the LINk will be entirely ‘virtual’ and carry out most of its business through the internet. At this early stage these things are unknown.
What is known, however, is that once the LINks are formed they will need to start listening to people and hearing their views about health and social care. They will need to think of all the different ways that they could do that giving consideration to all the different types of people that live in any one community, the different ways that people live and communicate as well as the different experiences they will have of health and social care services. Some people use health and social care services a lot and their views will be invaluable, other people will only use health and social care services very occasionally but their views are equally as important. Everyone needs to be offered the same opportunity to give their opinion in a way that suits them.
Different ways that people might want to be involved may include being part of the central governing structure, attending meetings or focus groups, completing questionnaires, doing a survey on a website, voting using their mobile phone, writing letters or talking to someone one-to-one. The list is endless!
We will be inviting people to register their interest through our specificLINks website once it is up and running. In the meantime if you are interested in hearing more about LINks, registering your interest or want to become involved in setting up the LINk then we would love to hear from you.
Please send us an email with your name, postcode and email address and a few lines about your interest in LINks and we will contact you in due course with more information. To email us click here.
Our first job as the host organisation in Poole, Bournemouth, Dorset and Torbay is to make contact with people who will be responsible for making sure we are doing our job properly and agree a plan to create a LINk in each area. Once we have done this we will start to make contact with local people in each area to find out who wants to be involved, particularly those who are keen to be involved in setting the LINks up.
Setting the LINks up properly is a critical stage in making sure that they each LINK can carry out its role really well in the future. We need to make sure we take into account as many people's views as possibe; particulatly those people who don't often get heard. We want to include lots of different types of people so that each LINks truly represents the community in which it is situated.
We will probably set up a core group of interested and suitably skilled and experienced people to work with us on how each LINK will be set up. We can only say 'probably' because we don't know yet what local people will say about how they want their LINk to be configured.
In the meantime we will be working with a marketing complany on getting information out to the general public about what LINks are all about. We will be inviting people to let us know if they are interested in getting involved. And we will want to hear from everyone and anyone who is interested in being involved at any level; whether people want to become part of the governing body or whether they just want to give their view about a single issue.
We will be inviting people to register their interest through our specifici LINks website once it is up and running. In the meantime if you are interested in hearing more about LINks, registering your interest or want to become involved in setting up the LINk then we would love to hear from you.
Please send us an email with your name, postcode and email address and a few lines about your interest in LINks and we will contact you in due course with more information. To email us click here.