Valuing People said that Partnership Boards are "to take responsibility for local delivery of the White paper, led by the local council and with the active participation of all key stakeholders"
Partnership Boards are there to provide leadership so that change happens. Meetings must be inclusive of everyone and lead to action
- Decision making in Partnership Boards is complicated. The board is not an "executive body "in its own right. This means that Board decisions cannot force other organisations to do things
- They have to work by persuading people and by people accepting they should do what the Board asks.
- Make sure that everyone is involved in the Board's decisions and people realise that those decisions are better than ones being made by organisations acting on their own
- Making sure that people from different cultural backgrounds are included
- Making sure everyone accepts that the Partnership Board is where they go to talk about important decisions for learning disability services
- Make sure that people with learning disabilities and carers are fully involved
- Make sure all plans include people with learning disabilities and their carers at all levels. Making sure the Partnership board knows about all the important plans
- Make sure the people who come to the meetings have the "authority" to speak on behalf of their organisation and to commit it to do things, and hopefully be creative about how things could change. For example, thinking about spending money in a different way.
- Looking at how services are delivered to best met the needs of people with learning disabilities and their carers. Asking those who lead to report on the progress.
- Make sure that the important things get done, not trying to do everything at once. Agree the big picture, the main strategies that need to happen. Decide who is going to lead the plan - when it will happen - how the Board will know things have changed.
- To check up that people are doing what they said they would do and that lives of people are changing in the way it has said it wants them do. If not, then the Board's job is to raise this, publicly, wherever it is needed
- The Board's job is to make links both inside and outside the meetings, with all the different "stakeholders" that are needed to help make Valuing People happen. It needs to understand what people outside the learning disability field are important and work to those priorities as well.
- Making sure that the local Implementation Group is getting on with what the Partnership Board has told it to do.
Agreed 2004