The Institute has seen it all when it comes to public consultation and engagement – the good, the bad and the ugly, the latter being legal judgments! Concepts and methods are widely shared by practitioners, available to learn about through training platforms and are well documented. Except one, ‘continuous engagement’. It is a term that gets mentions, is sometimes uttered and is eluded to in a few guidance documents, such as NHS Wales ‘Guidance for engagement and consultation on changes to health services’ and NHS England’s ‘Planning, assuring and delivering service change for patients’, as continuous involvement. But who can give it a definitive explanation, let alone demonstrate an example of good practice?

Maybe this is because there is not a definitive model. Good practice in continuous engagement will be different for different bodies, dictated to by differing value drivers and performance indicators as set by the body that wishes to implement it. But before we get into what it is and how it looks, let us ponder why we might want to consider it.

For most of us, our engagement and consultation modus operandi is to run specific programmes of consultation and engagement. The more advanced of us might also incorporate into a specific programme public and stakeholder involvement in solution development and option appraisal. Some of us will establish regular engagement discussions with groups of people, that take the form of stakeholder reference groups or forums, or we might regularly talk to community groups. Importantly, ‘regular’ is not the same as ‘continuous’, in this context.

The challenge with the way we work now is that it is mostly reactive. Internally we decide we have a problem that needs solving or we need to change our model or specific services because things have come to a head and we can wait no longer. It could be change because of austerity, imposed upon us or for other equally pressing reasons. Consequently, we might engage and often we will consult on solutions as a response to these issues rather than a constructive and proactive one. When we do, because of the circumstances that have brought us to this point, we have developed ideas internally before we involve public and stakeholders. This is not ideal because your public and stakeholders may know or sense this and suspect your mind is made up before you engage or consult. They might be wrong, but if we are honest, often they are right.

At a couple of recent workshops run by two of the Institute’s Associates on behalf of a public body, they were told by the body’s experts, who had been deliberating with service users and stakeholders, “We got this totally wrong, we should have been talking to these people before we formed any ideas. We need to start again.” This was not a unique incident, we have seen the same many times before, but for this body time and resource had been wasted.

Life does not need to be this way. We can work in a much smarter way that reduces the need for consultations in favour of achieving ‘organic’ change. This is where ‘continuous engagement’ comes to the fore. It offers a more practical and intelligent way for involving public and stakeholders as partners in a continuous process, that allows better collaborative working, opportunities for co-production and better outcomes that your public can support.

The start is the desire to stop being reactive and instead to be looking to the future with continuous improvement in mind. Coincidentally, now could not be a better time to change our thinking. We will probably have to.

Next week we will look at what continuous engagement might look like, how you build a strategy and how tCI can help you be the best.