Raising the voice of people with experience of homelessness
Brighton and Hove Common Ambition aims to improve support systems in Brighton and Hove through co-production and advocating for lived experience voices to be central to service and system change.
Arch is very proud to be a partner of this unique project that brings together people with lived experience of homelessness or drugs and alcohol harms, frontline providers, and commissioners, with the aim of improving health services and outcomes for people experiencing multiple compound needs in Brighton and Hove.
Central to the project is co-production, which operates on the premise that those who use a service are best placed to offer insights as to how it could be improved. This goes against the usual hierarchical nature of large-scale projects, and blurs the boundaries between delivering and receiving a service. For Common Ambition, safety, trauma-informed working, accessibility, balancing power dynamics and enabling equal voices are all key components to co-production.
Common Ambition was supported by The Health Foundation from March 2021 – May 2024 to focus on homelessness and health. At the hear of this work was the Steering Group made up of people with lived experience of homelessness, as well as staff members from Arch Healthcare, Justlife and the University of Brighton. During this time the key outputs of the project were as follows:
- Created a voice for people with experience of homelessness
- Developed a work and learning pathway for members
- Developed a unique trauma-informed approach
- Mapped and identified barriers and challenges within the system and pathways
- Co-produced processes, guidance, communications, including ways of working, co-production meeting guidance, using case studies guidance, a project website and lived experience led events.
- 15 co-production design sprints, with outputs including a training for medical students, service improvement consultations, a lived experience specification for a homeless hub, a comic book to raise awareness for the challenges faced by people experiencing homelessness and academic research.
From June 2024 onwards, Common Ambiton has continued to grow. There are now two programmes of work: the homelessness and health work continues, with support from the Health Foundation, Brighton and Hove City Council Housing Department, Changing Futures, Arch Health and Justlife. This work includes continuing to work on medical student training and the homeless healthcare hub.
The second programme of work, supported by Brighton and Hove City Council Public Health Department, is the development of a lived experience programme of work for the city’s Combatting Drugs Partnership. This has seen Common Ambition’s approach to co-production applied to working alongside people who have experienced drugs and alcohol harms to identify the challenges and work with the partnership to co-produce service and system improvements.
These are all available to view on the co-produced Common Ambition website.
Co-production and the CQC
The importance of co-production is highlighted by the CQC. Their report states:
“Putting the patient at the centre of the quality improvement (QI) journey sharpens the focus on delivering high-quality patient care and aligning improvement activity to outcomes and experience for patients. To deliver this, patients must be involved and enabled as true and equal partners for QI.”
“There are several trusts that are further along the journey to embedding improvement culture, where effective improvement-focused leadership has engaged, empowered and enabled staff, patients and carers in improving services. We have seen this approach reflected in achieving outstanding ratings.”
Brighton and Hove’s Common Ambition steering group with lived experience of homelessness have illustrated the experience of co-production, provided snapshots of their work, and described their journey in a co-produced project, in a series of powerful blogs, available to read here.
Steering Group member Jude’s blog, for example, offers an illuminating insight into the group’s working processes and the importance of having choice over whether to deal with upsetting topics: those who have experienced the trauma of becoming homeless have a unique insight on how to improve things, but this in itself can be a traumatic process. The group deals with difficult topics when co-producing improvements to housing and health systems that affect them personally, through Check-in, Choice and Control.
“At BHCA we all look out for each other, but we’re also empowered to look after ourselves. We deal with some hard hitting topics and although there will never be a perfect system where we can mitigate every trigger, our trauma-informed approach helps to keep everyone safe and happy.”
