The right help, in the right place, at the right time.

I was talking the other day with a colleague from another voluntary organisation, which, like us, provides support that improves people’s health and wellbeing, and keeps them out of hospital. They were trying to negotiate funding for what they did with a hard-pressed NHS body.

The challenge from potential commissioners was one with which people working in Shared Lives and Homeshare, and other community-based services, will be familiar: “You may be able to demonstrate what you do is good for people’s health and wellbeing, but in the current climate, how could we invest in it if it can’t demonstrate reduction in hospital bed days?”

One of my continuing frustrations is that, in return for investments which are a tiny fraction of local or national budgets, we demand from community-based support and preventative interventions a higher level of evidence than we demand of much more expensive formal state services. There are, for instance, large parts of the NHS, sucking up billions every year, which cannot demonstrate they reduce bed days: they are seen as having intrinsic value. And they do, but the value placed on a part of the health and care system should rest solely on the health and well-being outcomes it achieves, not on how well-established it is as part of the public service furniture,

Every recent health and care strategy talks about the value of community and voluntary services. Much of that value lies in their distance from hospitals and crisis services: not just in the sense that they reach people in their own homes, but also in that they can often act early, rather than close to the point of crisis; and they are culturally far removed from the medical world. If those interventions are valuable because they are far away from hospitals in time, distance, and approach, it makes no sense to demand, above all else, that they demonstrate their direct impact on those hospitals: if they are genuinely community-embedded, they will always fail that test.

This isn’t to say that we should not ask community providers to demonstrate the evidence of their impact. We have worked with Kent University and the Shared Lives sector to develop an academically-robust outcome measuring tool which is available without charge to every local Shared Lives organisation in the UK. The tool shows that Shared Lives services are reporting very high rates of improvement in the indicators of good health and well-being which matter most to people, which are as much about people’s connections (how many friends they have, for instance), as they are about their independence.

But as long as we continue to measure community services using terms defined by acute and crisis services, we will continue to conclude that life-changing approaches like Shared Lives are nice, but not essential, and we will tie up the lion’s share of limited public service budgets in buildings which many of us could avoid with a little bit of the right help, in the right place, at the right time.