The Royal Borough of Greenwich
Deliverables: Context Driven Intervention Strategy | Context-Specific Procedural Redesign
The Royal Borough of Greenwich was successful in its bid for the London Crime Prevention Fund 2017-2021. Through this initiative, MOPAC was providing funding to groups of partners to work together to deliver solutions to entrenched or emerging crime and community safety issues. The purpose of the fund was to drive innovative, new approaches and to extend the reach of existing effective services in London through the co-design, co-commissioning and co-delivery of services. The Co-commissioning fund was developed in consultation with London boroughs and wider partners.
8 in 10
completion rate for individual case studies brought forward by participants
The Challenge
INCREASING DEMAND AT A TIME OF AUSTERITY
The borough was experiencing increases in antisocial behaviour and was aware of more incidents of domestic violence as well as violence against women and girls. Using the same traditional approaches for the disparate was proving ineffectual and counterproductive. The departmental members and practitioners were increasingly becoming disillusioned and escalating more and more cases that they were allocated. There was a noticeable increase in domestic violence and violence against women and girls was also on the rise in sections of the borough. The apparent surge meant the need for more resources at a time when the borough did not have the resources required for additional services.
“When assessing candidates for posts recently...it has been immediately obvious when they have done your course! I do not know their background beforehand, but the difference is obvious and each time I have asked, they have been trauma trained by iCon! Turned out this chap had done it with Greenwich.”
90%
completion rate of 1- to-1 clinical supervision provided over 8 months
The Solution
DEEPENING CONTEXTUAL UNDERSTANDING OF PEOPLE AND SPACES, ACHIEVING GREATER OUTCOMES WITH THE SAME RESOURCES
We divided the community safety department into three contiguous sections and cohorts based on their work. The cohorts had the opportunity to explore the aspects of their work that they found most complex and poorly defined.
The staff were then introduced to the iCoN trauma awareness programme through taught content followed immediately by discussions about implementation in their daily activities. The process led immediately to action planning by the participants of the new and different information. On returning to the programme in a fortnight, the participants were able to report back on progress before taking on the next session of the taught content and devising new and more content. The iterative process continued until the metrics agreed to at the outset were achieved.
Chartered psychologists supported the taught section of the programme throughout the programme. On the one hand, participants received one hour of clinical supervision individually. The clinical supervision addressed the impact of the work on their wellbeing and resilience as well as other contextual elements that would impact the participants’ readiness for working with the cohorts of citizens they were supporting and supervising.
On the other hand, participants met with a separate chartered psychologist for case formulation - that being the participants’ opportunity to test their curiosity about the linkage between citizens as individuals or in groups’ behaviour with the participants’ knowledge about exposure to prior trauma.
We used a qualitative semi-structured approach for evaluation of the programme especially seeing as it was highly individualised, bespoke and person-centred. Very early in preparing participants for the programme, we held a series of meetings with each member to develop their learning objectives and learning journey. There were three elements we evolved in the course as the result of these discussions;
A. individuals’ motivation in agreeing to participate in the programme,
B. the managers’ perspectives of how the participants are selected and agreed on the expectations, outputs and outcomes that both the members and the line managers had individually, and
C. the interplay between the individual, the team and the organisation.
The on-going support within the programme, therefore, tracked the action plans agreed to at the programme outset.
At the end of the process, we repeated the semi-structured interviews with reviews of the original process to recapture the progress stages and an overall impression of the content, technique/method and structure of the programme. The application stages were based on the case reviews of the case management work that the participants and their managers chose for them to undertake as part of the learning.
The review template was agreed on at the beginning of the programme in the context of the training setting up activities and was based on the intended learning outcomes for participants.
“Before being trauma-informed I did not really consider that certain challenging behavior can be due to a traumatic event - not just personality or being ‘stuck’. ”
OUR IMPACT
• More compassionate & curious response
• Interventions rather than prosecution
• Reduction of returning domestic violence service users
The Result
A BETTER RESPONSE - REDUCING FAKE WORK!
Training of all RB of Greenwich Community Safety staff in two years.
Being Trauma-Informed - the absence of a compassionate response to people with trauma narratives created the impression of practitioners and the service not caring about the people they supervised and exacerbated the sense of victimhood in the community members concerned.
We achieved a change in the Departmental ethos to being more compassionate and curious, to consider the role of ACEs in assessing risks of violence, and in proposing interventions than prosecution.
Use of meaningful and jointly developed behaviour metrics. A common cause of artificial compliance actions was not knowing what results are required and when they should be achieved.
Being aware of the illusion of progress through ‘busy-ness’. Fake work prospers when people are uncertain about priorities. Don’t let ‘busy-ness’ overwhelm emphasis. Again, focus on the work that matters most. For example, if a regularly scheduled meeting fails to produce valuable results, remove it from the calendar.
Understand the people around you. Some people have a knack for handing off projects just when the work gets hard and accountability is on the line. Others invent new projects to prop up their reputation. The key is to recognise how other people’s behaviour can cause fake work; then figure out how to avoid falling into the fake work traps they’re setting. Equally important—and possibly even more difficult—is assessing whether you are the one who’s creating fake work for others.
Redrafting of the procedures for the domestic violence service towards reviewing historical clients that appeared to keep returning. New options were pursued and that started a decline in the numbers of such service users returning to the domestic violence service.
Eager To Establish Your Own Trauma- Informed Practice Environment?
Let Tipe help you adopt and apply Trauma- Informed & Attachment-Based principles as an integral part of your organisation.