S1: Personalisation and care planning

How are the different sectors responding to the government's personalisation agenda? How are your services personalised? What tools are used across sectors?

What practice models are employed at the frontline? What assessment and care/support planning tools are used? How do these work with people with multiple needs? Can service users access individual budgets?

What do funders require? Are services commissioned? Who by? How do they use data gathered at the frontline? Do they gather outcomes data or outputs?

How is support planning carried out? What are the boundaries around support planning?

S2: Stigma & discrimination

The way people and groups are understood and labelled reciprocates with the way that they see themselves. Experience of exclusion from services, or negative experiences of services based on assumptions of group characteristics reinforces their sense of being rejected and living on the outside of the mainstream. Yet to get help from a specialist service an individual must acquire the appropriate label, proving that they fit the criteria, although the same labels can lead to exclusion when seeking other services. Service threshold criteria is necessary to ensure that specialist services are targeted at those with greatest need, but often those who do not have the severity of need under any single heading may still experience significant damage due to the combination of their needs.

Labels such as offender, care leaver, rough sleeper, drug addict define a person by their situation and problems not their needs, rights and potential.

Can we talk about this "group" without creating new labels? Can we find a common language that explains, challenges and includes rather than adds to the burden of existing labels?

What is the impact of gender, race and age in this debate?

S3: Service user involvement

To what extent have concepts around service user involvement influenced or become embedded in each sector? How central is the concept of involvement to the overall service delivery model? Does “empowerment” fit with this idea and how?

What practical approaches have services in each sector taken to increase the voice and choice of services users? What are the issues around increasing involvement of people with multiple needs? What is the role and how developed are user led / run organisations in each sector? Do services in each sector employ former service users? What is the approach to this?

S4: Recovery & social integration

Our sectors operate within distinct, different concepts of the problem to be addressed and the interventions that are applied, with limited common ground emerging in the assumptions and models that we use.

What models and tools does each sector apply? Is there diversity within each sector? What are the assumptions and constraints that underpin these models? To what extent to funders determine the models to be used?

What language do we use to describe the people we work with? What happens at the frontline in different services? How is the relationship between the service user and their keyworker understood?

S5: Personal responsibilities and rights

How does each sector understand and balance people's rights and responsibilities? What rights do we try to advocate for? How do concepts around responsibility or intentionality influence how we operate or how the services we interact with serve this group?

What are the boundaries of the responsibilities of people who use services? What do we expect in terms of compliance with service regimes and models? How and when do we exclude people? How and when do people exclude themselves? How do we encourage and support people to take responsibility? How do we reinforce their rights?

How can models of cognitive and social learning and mental capacity help or hinder?

S6: Families and communities

People with multiple needs often fall out of the support networks that could help them. Services can help reconnect people.

How does each sector involve families or the community? How do we link people back in? What can we do to ensure that people with multiple needs have, and contribute to, a supportive community and have links to their family?

What do we understand about what family and community mean to people with multiple needs? What are the links between negative factors in peoples’ families and communities that may lie behind their needs?

What does ‘the community’ think about this group?

How do concepts of culture, family structure and group membership help in developing our understanding of each others' work?