Blog: Finding out how Affinity Trust are using the Working Together Checker

Coproduction means professionals working with people with learning disabilities to do or change something.

By professional we mean anyone who works with someone with a learning disability.

This could be a doctor, a social worker, a manager, an office worker, or a support worker.

At Bild we prefer to use the words ‘working together’ when we talk about coproduction, as these are simpler words and not jargon.

We created the Working Together Checker to help people and organisations keep track of if they are doing good working together.

Affinity Trust supports older people with learning disabilities and autism.

They run some supported living locations and they also support people in their own homes.

They wanted to find out if they were doing good working together, and to make sure they could do better at working together with the people who they support in future.

They decided to use the Working Together Checker to help them do this.

Kate is Bild’s Learning Disability Advisor and chair of Bild for the Future.

She interviewed Affinity Trust to find out how they are using the Working Together Checker.

You can read the interview below.

We found out about the Working Together Checker from an email we got from Bild.

It is good to be on the mailing list because we find out about lots of good things that are happening.

We were invited to a regional managers meeting by our Divisional Director for the East region.

Sarah (Affinity Trust Co-production Lead), Ami-Rose and Jason joined the managers meeting to do a session with them about working together.

Ami and Jason started by introducing themselves and talking about being part of the Affinity Trust Coproduction team. They shared about some of the work they have been doing.

After this we shared the Bild Working Together Checker with the managers.

There were 21 local and senior managers in the meeting. We asked them to split into small groups and each group looked at the checker together.

We asked them to look at the questions on the checker and score them for how well we are doing working together at Affinity Trust so far.

We used voting paddles with thumbs up, thumbs down and half-way to decide the scores. People held up their paddles to show their votes each time.

Ami and Jason counted the scores and we put them on a big board for everyone to see.

The best standard was ‘People are given the right support in a person centred way’- it scored 13 out of 21.

The standard that needs most improvement is ‘People are involved in all aspects of the work or project’.

We know that we need to do more work on helping people to understand what lived experience leadership looks like.

Ami and Jason have been doing a great job with this but we need to do more.

Yes – we plan for the Affinity Trust Coproduction team to use the Working Together Checker for our projects and bigger pieces of work.

Yes!