A definition of a Good Neighbour Scheme (GNS) is ordinary people doing everyday things for other people in their community when that is needed.
In Suffolk over 60,000 people in 39 communities have access to 30 good neighbour schemes which are supported by Suffolk ACRE.
There are also other voluntary help schemes in Suffolk but the Suffolk GNS is a unique model. In the UK there are other schemes called "Good Neighbours" but practically all other schemes generally serve a larger area and have criteria such as age, prior service, a medical condition, time limit or make a charge to access their services. Some employ paid staff and so have offices and overheads like a business while every Suffolk GNS is run entirely by volunteers from their kitchen table.
In Suffolk over 60,000 people in 39 communities have access to 30 good neighbour schemes which are supported by Suffolk ACRE.
There are also other voluntary help schemes in Suffolk but the Suffolk GNS is a unique model. In the UK there are other schemes called "Good Neighbours" but practically all other schemes generally serve a larger area and have criteria such as age, prior service, a medical condition, time limit or make a charge to access their services. Some employ paid staff and so have offices and overheads like a business while every Suffolk GNS is run entirely by volunteers from their kitchen table.
 |
| Good Neighbour Schemes build Social Capital, Networks, Community. |
Access to a GNS in Suffolk is available to everyone living in the community that a scheme serves. There is no age or need criteria before you can ask if another neighbour can give you some help or perhaps just some company. It's not an emergency service but for most simple domestic tasks, a willing neighbour can be found.
Newfoundland, where my ancestors come from, has some of the harshest weather on earth. A proverb said there is: "look after your neighbours or you could die..." That aphorism recognises that the purpose of society is our mutual survival.
Every community has good-hearted people who will automatically help their neighbours, but the aim of the Good Neighbour Scheme is to fill any gaps in this network and to put help within reach of every resident of a community.
By the brokerage of a GNS, those in need of help have access to more neighbours willing to help and people are more willing to help their neighbours if there are other neighbours who will help too.
Abuse of people’s goodwill is quite rare and prevention is inherent in the system as all tasks depend on whether a neighbour is willing to voluntarily help another. A great number are.
Newfoundland, where my ancestors come from, has some of the harshest weather on earth. A proverb said there is: "look after your neighbours or you could die..." That aphorism recognises that the purpose of society is our mutual survival.
Every community has good-hearted people who will automatically help their neighbours, but the aim of the Good Neighbour Scheme is to fill any gaps in this network and to put help within reach of every resident of a community.
By the brokerage of a GNS, those in need of help have access to more neighbours willing to help and people are more willing to help their neighbours if there are other neighbours who will help too.
Abuse of people’s goodwill is quite rare and prevention is inherent in the system as all tasks depend on whether a neighbour is willing to voluntarily help another. A great number are.
All the services a GNS provide apart from transport are free of charge. There are no joining fees, subscriptions or tokens to buy nor hours banked or exchanged by a LETS scheme. The user reimburses their neighbour for any expenses, such as parking or materials. For transport; the schemes ask users to reimburse the volunteer to cover their mileage at the HMRC rate of 45 pence per mile (this is well under the true cost of motoring today).
Current Schemes
|
District
|
Bildeston
(Helping Hands)
|
Babergh
|
Brantham
|
Babergh
|
Harkstead &
Lower Holbrook
|
Babergh
|
Long Melford
|
Babergh
|
Newton
|
Babergh
|
Shotley &
Erwarton
|
Babergh
|
Tattingstone
|
Babergh
|
Lakenheath
|
Forest Heath
|
Bacton, Cotton
& Wyverstone
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Dagworth, Old
Newton & Gipping
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Earl Stonham
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Finningham
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Rickinghall
& Botesdale
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Stowupland
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Stradbroke
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Wetherden
|
Mid Suffolk
|
Barrow &
Denham
|
St Edmundsbury
|
Chevington
|
St Edmundsbury
|
Honington &
Sapiston
|
St Edmundsbury
|
Horringer
|
St Edmundsbury
|
Aldeburgh AGNES
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Aldringham cum
Thorpe
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Cookley &
Walpole
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Framlingham Our
Help (Rotary based)
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Kesgrave
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Ufford
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Wenhaston WeHelp
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Wickham Market
|
Suffolk Coastal
|
Halesworth &
Holton (Bus Buddies)
|
Waveney
|
Each
GNS is different and each is devised according to the needs in the community
and the willingness of those prepared to help others in their community.
Every
GNS is an independent organisation and is run by local volunteers. Each volunteer is a resident in the same community as their 'client'. Like a time-bank, neighbours can be both clients and volunteers in their local scheme and most are.
The
schemes themselves determine what it is they can do and how they can help so there
are differences between the schemes.
For example in Halesworth there is already a volunteer centre so the GNS model has been used to provide volunteer bus conductors on
the 511 service to enable vulnerable and disabled people to use public
transport and remain independent. This in turn reduces the pressure on the local community car scheme and supports the volunteer bus drivers and makes the buses a social space that reduces loneliness and encourages activity and engagement in the community.
In the villages of Cookley and Walpole the GNS will make housecalls but most of their effort is
put into running a very popular monthly café in a community where there are
very few facilities.
Many
GNS are the ‘labour exchange’ for other community activity such as
carnivals and fetes, emergency response, Neighbourhood Watch and sports clubs. All GNS work closely with other statutory and voluntary organisations providing help such as Safer Neighbourhood Teams, Age UK, WRVS and community transport schemes.
In
Wickham Market, a new service grew out of their GNS where 15 of its volunteers took part in additional training to provide personal care to people
to become the Wickham Market Family Carers Group.
This kind of community development is made possible with the platform of GNS schemes existing in the community.
The community development charity Suffolk ACRE (soon to become Community Action Suffolk) is able to help communities start a good neighbour scheme and then give
ongoing support when any issues come up; this can be things like complex changes in the
Government’s Vetting and Barring Scheme or car insurance rules which seem to change one year to the next.
Suffolk
ACRE provides a scheme manual and community development officers to help a scheme
get started which covers all the basics, based on their experience since the first scheme was started in Suffolk in 2002.
Jane Cody, chairman of Kesgrave GNS said to the BBC: “The most important thing I would stress is how much of a difference it made to be able to use Suffolk ACRE’s model and get their very wholehearted back up. They gave us all the time and resources we needed, their model is tried and tested, with the minimum amount of bureaucracy but adequate safeguards, and they add an instant gravitas and body of knowledge/experience which is vital when a well meaning group of locals want to energise and mobilise their neighbours into action!”
Jane Cody, chairman of Kesgrave GNS said to the BBC: “The most important thing I would stress is how much of a difference it made to be able to use Suffolk ACRE’s model and get their very wholehearted back up. They gave us all the time and resources we needed, their model is tried and tested, with the minimum amount of bureaucracy but adequate safeguards, and they add an instant gravitas and body of knowledge/experience which is vital when a well meaning group of locals want to energise and mobilise their neighbours into action!”
GNS
volunteers have scheme identity cards and a Criminal Records Bureau check. Though the law does not require an enhanced CRB check of these kind of volunteers, except
for very specific tasks involving medical transport and money, a CRB is a requirement for insurance.
GNS
schemes are self-sufficient; the money needed for their public liability insurance, CRB checks
and publicity and any other expenses is just a few hundred pounds per year and it is raised
locally. Local people are willing to support their schemes as they see immediately what the money goes on.
The costs of supporting GNS are extremely good value for the service they provide. One missed medical appointment can cost the public purse hundreds of pounds. A house fire can cost millions. According to reports, loneliness and isolation is blamed for increasing demand on health and social care services, causing people to go to hospital more often and move into residential care at an earlier stage.
The task of establishment of these schemes (and its cost) would be even less if there was less demand for box-ticking paperwork. Volunteers are usually more interested in giving their time to helping people, not sweating over risk assessments or drafting an Equal Opportunities Policy or compiling statistics for grant applications of how many people they serve, their gender and orientation, and how many elderly people were prevented from falls, which is really quite impossible to quantify but plainly a GNS makes a difference. A point made in the Parable of the Blobs and Squares.
The costs of supporting GNS are extremely good value for the service they provide. One missed medical appointment can cost the public purse hundreds of pounds. A house fire can cost millions. According to reports, loneliness and isolation is blamed for increasing demand on health and social care services, causing people to go to hospital more often and move into residential care at an earlier stage.
The task of establishment of these schemes (and its cost) would be even less if there was less demand for box-ticking paperwork. Volunteers are usually more interested in giving their time to helping people, not sweating over risk assessments or drafting an Equal Opportunities Policy or compiling statistics for grant applications of how many people they serve, their gender and orientation, and how many elderly people were prevented from falls, which is really quite impossible to quantify but plainly a GNS makes a difference. A point made in the Parable of the Blobs and Squares.
The highest demand on most GNS is for transport for medical appointments; trips to hospital and doctors at a pre-arranged time. This demand is because many people do not have friends or family able to take them. A trip to hospital for an outpatient appointment by a taxi with 2 hours waiting time will be in excess of £100 from IP17 postcode to the Norfolk & Norwich.* A GNS volunteer or community car journey would be around £40 for the same. A neighbour would also be more able and flexible to wait with the user and see them safely home again. *Quotations obtained October 2012.
Many communities with an active GNS are isolated from public transport and what alternatives there are,
such as DRT, are very often incompatible with appointment times and with travelling to
hospital when you are unwell.
According to
the Department for Transport; 21.1 % of people in rural Suffolk live more than
60 minutes by public transport from hospital compared to 9.9% of rural England
overall. Source: OCSI 2011 Department for Transport (DfT) 2009.
There are 35
LSOAs (each averages a population of 5000 people) in Suffolk more than two
hours travel time from a hospital by public transport.
Another peak demand is transport for shopping or a volunteer to do shopping when someone is unwell or has come back from hospital. Schemes sometimes provide, depending on volunteers, more intensive support for person back from hospital or with a long term illness until social services arrangements can be made by committing to a certain frequency of visits for a limited time.
There have been instances (thankfully few) of people being discharged from hospital without any support at home when someone has called a GNS to say that the patient is being discharged that day and could the GNS go to visit them. The GNS volunteers are put in a position where they cannot refuse and it puts them into conflict with statutory organisations they prefer to work in partnership with.
Those few instances have been addressed but such demands from statutory services put GNS in a defensive position of stating what they cannot do more than what they can offer. GNS have always had to draw a line a lifting, dressing or feeding someone or complex needs. There is always more demand for such care than they can supply and the many issues of insurance and competence and duty of care are beyond their resources.
There is a ticking time-bomb of dementia in the ageing UK population and so increasing demand for local support of the patients and their carers. Local solutions similar to the GNS model such as the Debenham Project can go a long way to meeting that need. Meantime in-patient beds in the Waveney and Yarmouth area are being cut from 42 to 20 and the number of acute dementia beds from 12 to 3, with 500 front line NHS posts being reduced across Norfolk and Suffolk.
All GNS are excellent at signposting as they are local people with local knowledge on what works and what doesn't, when the shops are open, which shops deliver, what's on at the village hall tomorrow and who are the local tradesmen, the sort of information a distant call centre can't possibly keep up to date.
Some GNS volunteers have experience from their working lives or have enough willing to advise or advocate on behalf of a vulnerable or disabled neighbour and their families to ensure fair and proper access to services. For many people completing a 14 page form and obtaining photographs (requiring a journey) is a considerable barrier to obtaining a bus pass.
A high proportion of people when surveyed ask nascent GNS for befriending and a greater number have the need but are reluctant to ask. All GNS offer volunteers who can check in regularly with neighbours to
give them social contact and GNS provide somebody they can call if they need
some help with a small domestic problem. It might be changing a light bulb,
which is vital to prevent falls, or resetting a boiler or thermostat or just
checking in on behalf of distant family and giving reassurance to those living
alone, maintaining their independence. Some GNS hold keys and emergency contact information for relatives of
people living alone or people who are both working and caring for someone.
A
fairly typical GNS is the parish of Aldringham Cum Thorpe which has 700 residents. In 2011 they completed 262 tasks:
Shopping
or social transport 33
Medical transport 149
Garden
tidy, DIY etc. 64
Sitting
with or checking on a vulnerable person 10
Pet
sitting or walking 6
In
a larger village; the Wickham Market GNS in 2011 completed 836 tasks, or 70 per
month for a population of 2400.
"Task" though doesn't quite describe the extent of the work done. Some tasks are a simple visit or a trip to the shops (that is at least 2 hours of someone's time) but sometimes a call leads to hours of advocacy, which is willingly entered into but often frustrating and despairing as services, such as Patient Transport, are reduced in this time of austerity.
"Task" though doesn't quite describe the extent of the work done. Some tasks are a simple visit or a trip to the shops (that is at least 2 hours of someone's time) but sometimes a call leads to hours of advocacy, which is willingly entered into but often frustrating and despairing as services, such as Patient Transport, are reduced in this time of austerity.
The latest scheme is in Kesgrave and is the most ambitious to date as it has a population
of 15,000. What was surprising in the initial survey was how many
people there wanted social contact and the large number of people willing to help.
Wickham
Market GNS has recently stepped up efforts to recruit people interested in
befriending on a regular basis because of the number of people who say they are
isolated or are vulnerable.
Some
of their clients already receive care arranged by social services but a half-hour
carer visit doesn't achieve much; “there isn't much socialising in getting
someone up and dressed” says its chairman John Hoe.
Wickham
Market GNS also involves young people through the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme. The young volunteers do gardening, leaflet delivery and dog walking. Their parents
are involved and briefed. There are not a lot of other opportunities for young
people to volunteer in Wickham Market. The GNS also organised a Jubilee garden party
for over 50 of their users.
Other
impacts of GNS are that volunteers can support local charities by arranging
collection and transport of donated furniture and clothes and collecting and returning
electric blankets for the Fire Service. Wickham Market’s volunteers have done
village litter picking, maintain the churchyard and maintain the Resource
Centre’s gardens. These kinds of tasks are done by the other schemes too.
In the last few decades the Voluntary and Community Sector has had to adapt to operating in a competitive marketplace, each chasing a slice of private, public and statutory funding which is competitively tendered in a grant application process (let's set aside the process of moving into sustainability). This is very beneficial in that good ideas that actually work get funded and poor ideas or bad practise don't. At least, that's the theory.
A cynic might say, and there are many, that slick expensive presentations get funding over ones made at home and timing is everything. The first applicant that ticks the box when a statutory funder has a target or imperative to meet (such as outsource the public sector) will get funded, even if they ask for £800,000 to set up in three years something that has already existed for ten years that runs on 5% of that. They just didn't know that funder had money burning a hole in its pocket.
These days there is increasing desire amongst statutory funders to make every agency meeting society's needs (and in a sense its failures) sustainable, i.e. self funded, with the users paying for the service. However, it is quite obvious when you are tackling deprivation, that the lack of such means is the issue. There are many burdens it is simply the duty of a civilised society to shoulder as a whole: thus should national defence be made sustainable? Ah, but we all benefit from defence, so everyone should pay for that, say the sustainability advocates. And...? says the community activist.
This paradigm pits organisations against each other to serve a particular 'need group', attract funding and take the credit for tackling society's problems. Naturally there can be sometimes double-counting of outcomes and in practise, sometimes the delivery doesn't quite match lofty ambitions. The funders employ experts to scrutinise the applicants and so the funded organisations have a considerable overhead in accounting for themselves.
Whilst competition is healthy and creates stimulus, to be healthy it must be overt, such as between football teams. However in the VCS it is often unspoken and can be insidious. Everyone has to put on a face of working in partnership for the public meantime stabbing each other in the back in the boardroom or quietly seething as a newly minted agency, flush with funds, steals the headlines - and so further funding - for something others do better but cannot crow about. Competition and 'payment by results' can be a stimulus for bad practises too, consider the failures surrounding Atos. The various channels of statutory funding - by definition subject to political influence - is complicit in this by manipulating the funding streams to meet particular and ever-changing objectives.
Good Neighbour Schemes are frequently invited by statutory and voluntary bodies to develop further services and take part in local consultations. The NHS want to find ways to prevent people going into hospitals and more support from such schemes can obviously be part of the solution but it is not the solution alone. Providing more support to people with social care needs in the GNS model is not really about money, it’s more about providing the means and removing the barriers and discouragement to volunteers willing and able to help.
A cynic might say, and there are many, that slick expensive presentations get funding over ones made at home and timing is everything. The first applicant that ticks the box when a statutory funder has a target or imperative to meet (such as outsource the public sector) will get funded, even if they ask for £800,000 to set up in three years something that has already existed for ten years that runs on 5% of that. They just didn't know that funder had money burning a hole in its pocket.
These days there is increasing desire amongst statutory funders to make every agency meeting society's needs (and in a sense its failures) sustainable, i.e. self funded, with the users paying for the service. However, it is quite obvious when you are tackling deprivation, that the lack of such means is the issue. There are many burdens it is simply the duty of a civilised society to shoulder as a whole: thus should national defence be made sustainable? Ah, but we all benefit from defence, so everyone should pay for that, say the sustainability advocates. And...? says the community activist.
This paradigm pits organisations against each other to serve a particular 'need group', attract funding and take the credit for tackling society's problems. Naturally there can be sometimes double-counting of outcomes and in practise, sometimes the delivery doesn't quite match lofty ambitions. The funders employ experts to scrutinise the applicants and so the funded organisations have a considerable overhead in accounting for themselves.
Whilst competition is healthy and creates stimulus, to be healthy it must be overt, such as between football teams. However in the VCS it is often unspoken and can be insidious. Everyone has to put on a face of working in partnership for the public meantime stabbing each other in the back in the boardroom or quietly seething as a newly minted agency, flush with funds, steals the headlines - and so further funding - for something others do better but cannot crow about. Competition and 'payment by results' can be a stimulus for bad practises too, consider the failures surrounding Atos. The various channels of statutory funding - by definition subject to political influence - is complicit in this by manipulating the funding streams to meet particular and ever-changing objectives.
Good Neighbour Schemes are frequently invited by statutory and voluntary bodies to develop further services and take part in local consultations. The NHS want to find ways to prevent people going into hospitals and more support from such schemes can obviously be part of the solution but it is not the solution alone. Providing more support to people with social care needs in the GNS model is not really about money, it’s more about providing the means and removing the barriers and discouragement to volunteers willing and able to help.
To find out more about Good Neighbour Schemes, visit the Suffolk ACRE website.
No comments:
Post a Comment