The case of Suffolk JSNA partners

Suffolk County Council, Suffolk PCT and Great Yarmouth and Waveney PCT produced their first JSNA document between May 2007 and January 2008. They underwent a ‘Lessons Learned’ exercise on completion and highlighted a number of areas to be developed further in the future. The JSNA Quality Assurance Exercise conducted by CSIP Eastern and it’s partners over June and July 2008 showed that many of these lessons were equally applicable to other areas in the region. The xx key lessons identified in Suffolk were:

1. Strong project management is essential in order to steer the large amount of data and stakeholders successfully from project initiation through to completion.
2. As the project progresses and an increasing number if organisations/ individuals become aware of the project it is likely that some of them will want to become more involved than they previously indicated. Whilst not necessarily a bad thing this does need to be carefully managed.
3. As well as the ‘core’ data set as laid out in the Commissioning Framework for Health and Wellbeing, a supplementary ‘Wish List’ of additional data will need to be compiled and defined at as early a stage of the process as possible. Deadlines for submitting additions to this wish list need to be made clearly to contributors and kept to by the project manager.
4. The buy-in, support and commitment of key managers needs to be sought early on in the process.
5. The JSNA for Suffolk is designed to be relevant to as wide a range of stakeholders as possible, therefore its usability and accessibility as a document to those without specialist knowledge is key, as is being structured in such a way that allows the user to find the information they want quickly and in an intuitive way.
6. As a document and as a concept, the JSNA has vast potential for influencing the setting of priorities amongst a wide range of organisations in Suffolk. Future working groups need to be mindful of this when updating the document and aim to build upon and improve in future iterations.
7. Given the large number of stakeholders involved, monthly update/progress reports are a useful way of keeping them informed and to provide them with an opportunity to feed into the process should they wish (See appendix 2).
8. The scope and limits of the project needs to be articulated clearly to stakeholders from as early a stage as possible.
9. The JSNA project group needs to include representation from all statutory partners and also key non-statutory stakeholders including (for example):
   1. Housing (Supporting People, District/ Borough Councils)
   2. Community and Voluntary Sector
   3. Carers sector
   4. Districts and borough councils
10. Some slippage needs to be built into the project timescales to account for unforeseen delays, which are likely given the complexity of the project.
11. Partners need to be committed to the project, including guaranteeing staff/officer time.
12. Given the length of the document, consideration should be give at the outset as to how it should be written. There are two possible approaches:
    1. The project manager writes the entire first draft using the information/ data supplied by different organisations/ departments. The experts in specific areas then edit their specific areas before the project manager then re-edits the whole document to make it read consistently throughout. This process was adopted for the JSNA for Suffolk, and succeeds in delivering good results, although the project manager needs a lot of capacity to deliver given the size of the project.
    2. Individual experts write their respective chapters before the project manager brings the whole together. This process delegates some work away from the project manager but creates a risk that some drastic editing will be required if the different authors write in very different styles. There is also a risk that some may write more than others leading to a potentially unbalanced document.
13.  Always stay mindful of the goals of the project – don’t lose sight of the wood through the trees.