Case Studies

Integration of the JSNA and Needs Assessment for the Children’s Plan in Bedfordshire

1 Context

Bedfordshire’s Community Intelligence (CI) Team, part of the County Council’s Corporate Policy Group, produced the first needs assessment for the Children and Young People’s Strategic Partnership (CYPSP) in 2005. This was well received by partners and DCSF. In 2007, CYPSP commissioned a consultant for the Joint Area Review. Children’s Services later found significant inaccuracies in the consultant’s use of statistical evidence. While unfortunate, this discovery enabled recognition of research and intelligence as a specialist discipline. For the new Children’s Plan (2008-2011), Children’s Services invited the CI Team to develop the underpinning needs assessment.

2 How we gained the commitment of Children’s Services to JSNA

The CI Team produced a project brief for Children’s Services and the PCT explaining how the introduction of JSNAs significantly overlapped with DCSF requirements. Merging the JSNA and children’s needs assessment therefore made sense – there was insufficient analyst resource to run parallel processes.

We defined roles and responsibilities in precise detail to manage expectations and gain process ownership. We improved trust by recognising our distinctive contributions: the CI Team would confirm statistical significance, presenting information reliably and graphically; Children’s Services would confirm practical significance. We rebuilt the JSNA around familiar outcomes instead of the DH list of minimum datasets.

To extend the JSNA’s impact, the CI Team and the PCT’s Public Health Intelligence Team offered to deliver a set of completely new research projects; the commissioning leads for Children’s and Adults Services and the Director of Public Health jointly endorsed the list. Children’s Services provided cash to temporarily increase team capacity.

3 Issues, challenges and how we overcame them

  • Who makes editorial decisions? Children’s Services wanted positive stories for the Annual Performance Assessment (APA); the JSNA project team focused JSNA on unmet needs (bad news), and the PCT needed assurance that the JSNA would not be doctored to highlight good performance. Therefore the JSNA project manager acted as JSNA editor, and Children’s Services had responsibility for selecting evidence used in the APA and Children’s Plan, with a ground rule that evidence from JSNA must be quoted without amendment.
  • Multiple age definitions of children/young people - to split the JSNA chapters on children and adults we adopted the DCSF definition.
  • How should we align evidence to outcomes? We took the wide-ranging evidence base for the national Children’s Plan (published December 2007) as a reference point but we had to systematically appraise its potential re-use. We successfully reasoned with Children’s Services that the structure of JSNA should be compatible with the national outcomes framework, not the structure of Bedfordshire’s CYPSP, while the Children’s Plan could be based on the latter
  • Issues affecting children vs whole households – we have treated the JSNA as a ‘sandwich’, with whole population issues and inequalities as the bread layers and children/adult chapters as the filling.

4 Future Plans

  • Further development of new joint County Council/PCT website to disseminate JSNA, to include other strategic assessments, resources for policy making, online groups and secure data sharing, supported by a detailed schedule of datasets to supplement our high level Information Sharing Protocol.
  • The JSNA project team will help CYPSP build a requirement for systematic evaluation into the commissioning framework, eliminate research duplication between partners by having a nominated role within CYPSP to capture new research requests, and eventually establish a pooled research budget.
  • Given that survey evidence on children and young people is patchy and of limited application, we want to consider a large-scale local lifestyle survey for young people, and longitudinal cohort studies.
  • More joint demand forecasting.
  • Improve the ability of analysts to predict practical significance and of commissioning managers to use JSNA confidently.

5 Learning points

  • For Children’s Services, APA will always take priority over JSNA unless/until the JSNA process contributes to star ratings.

To improve the JSNA process we should:

  • Communicate the purpose of JSNA effectively to managers unfamiliar with commissioning (e.g. some education managers), emphasising the distinction between service performance data and predicting population needs.
  • Ensure analytical reports are acted on by services.
  • Integrate the County/PCT analysts.