The Personalised Care Maturity Assessment Tool

Use our Personalised Care Maturity Assessment Tool to review, understand, and benchmark where your service or organisation is in terms of working, and delivering care, in a personalised and strengths-based way

The Maturity Assessment, together with the linked Action Plan, will provide you with a roadmap for embedding and growing personalisation in your service.

By completing this process – and we can support you to do this (see the bottom of this page for how we can help) – you’ll know where your organisation is now, where it needs to be, and how to get there.

Use the Our Shared Agreement Five Foundations to guide you

The Maturity Assessment Tool is anchored in the Five Foundations of Our Shared Agreement (see below), which support the development of a better relationship between people and the health and care system in Lincolnshire.

The Five Foundations encourage you to listen to and work with the people you support as you introduce personalisation into your service. By working with people and understanding their needs, preferences, experience and capabilities, you will be better placed to co-produce personalised approaches that work both for the people who use your service, and your workforce.

• Foundation 1: Being prepared to do things differently
• Foundation 2: Understanding what matters to ourselves and each other
• Foundation 3: Working together for the wellbeing of everyone
• Foundation 4: Conversations with and not about people
• Foundation 5: Making the most of what we have available to us

What are the benefits of completing the Maturity Assessment?

Completing the assessment will enable you to:

Understand your service’s current personalised care activity and capabilities

• The Assessment provides a systematic review of your service’s current state in four core areas of good personalised care, providing a baseline that you can build from.

Identify areas for improvement

• The Tool helps you to reflect on your current practices, identify barriers to progress, gaps in provision, and opportunities for positive change, giving you a clear steer on how you could improve your service.

Prioritise your development efforts

• By understanding your service’s current state, you can focus resources on specific areas to create the greatest impact for your team, service, and the people you support.

Support innovation

• The Assessment encourages you to reassess and reimagine your service’s practice, and explore new ways of working to improve how you support people.

Enhance your service performance

• By addressing areas of low maturity and leveraging strengths, you’ll improve overall service performance and better achieve your goals. 

Track your progress to continuous improvement

• Use the Tool to track your journey towards personalised care as ‘business as usual’ and ensure continuous improvement moving forward.

Align your service with a system-wide movement

• Working with this assessment framework aligns you in terms approach and language to the way personalisation is being introduced and embedded across the Lincolnshire Integrated Care System (ICS). You'll be part of a county-wide transformation programme.

How to use the Maturity Assessment Tool and Action Plan

We’ve developed the Assessment Tool to be concise and simple to use. To complete the Assessment, simply follow the guidance below. This guidance can also be found in the Assessment Tool document. 

How the Maturity Assessment is organised

The Tool asks you to assess four core areas of your organisation or service. These four areas are the building blocks of good personalised care delivery:

• A prepared service / organisation
• A prepared team / workforce
• Prepared people / patients
• Supportive systems and processes

Within each of the above core areas are statements describing best practice in personalised and strength-based approaches. 

Rate your service's maturity level

Use the maturity scale (0 to 5) to rate where your organisation or service is in relation to each personalisation best practice statement:

• 0 - Not planted: Not currently a priority or is not being implemented at all.
• 1 - Planting: Individuals or teams are starting to explore the approach and become curious about its potential.
• 2 - Emerging: There's a growing understanding of the approach, and it's being applied in a few specific examples or activities.
• 3 - Growing: The approach is becoming more established, with individuals and teams building their capabilities and applying it more frequently and effectively.
• 4 - Embedding: The approach is being used in a wide range of activities and has a noticeable positive impact on the organisation or service.
• 5 - Thriving: The approach is deeply ingrained in the organisation's culture and practices, leading to consistent and sustainable positive impact.

Provide a rationale for your maturity level rating

• Explain why you selected a particular maturity level.
• Describe current capabilities and areas for improvement.
• Identify barriers and external factors affecting progress.

Provide supporting evidence

• Refer to specific elements and evidence that support your maturity level selection.

See examples of completed Maturity Assessment tables below:

Create an Action Plan

• Identify gaps: Analyse assessment results to pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Prioritise actions: Rank initiatives based on impact and feasibility.
• Develop actions: Define clear, measurable steps to address gaps.
• Assign responsibilities: Identify individuals or teams accountable for each action.
• Set timelines: Establish a schedule for implementing the action plan.
• Monitor and evaluate: Track progress and adjust the plan as needed.​​​​

See the example of a completed Action Plan table below:

We’re here to help

The It’s All About People Personalisation Team are ready to support you.

Prepared organisation / service

• If it would help, we can support teams, services and organisations to complete the Personalised Care Maturity Assessment through a facilitated conversation or workshop.
• We can also work with you to develop a SMART Action Plan that focuses on your areas of priority and gets you to where you want to be.

Prepared team / workforce

• Our Learning and Development Hub includes a growing range of courses, workshops, study days, events, podcasts, and videos. These are designed to build you and your team's skills, knowledge, and confidence to deliver personalised and strengths-based practice for your organisation and the people you support. 

Preparing people / patients

• We work with partners and people with lived experience to explore ways to support and enable people and patients to be prepared for their appointments and conversations with health and care staff, optimising opportunities for this to be personalised to them.
• We can also facilitate co-production work that you undertake with the people and patients you support.

Supportive systems and processes

We offer several Personalisation tools and approaches that support your service or organisation to work in a personalised and strengths-based way.

If you'd like to talk to us about how we can help you with your Maturity Assessment and Action plan, don't hesitate to contact us at lhnt.itsallaboutpeople@nhs.net