Trusted person approaches
Trusted person approaches are all about helping an individual who faces multiple disadvantage to get the support they need without having to repeat their story over and over.
The approaches aim to help the people who are trusted with an individual’s story to secure the help of the various teams who can get involved – sometimes through a professionals meeting if that’s most needed.
The approaches also aim to link up people who work with individuals facing multiple disadvantage from across our system, helping share stories of successes which can be repeated and failures we can all learn from and avoid repeating; also clarifying where there are common barriers and how the Changing Futures team can help get these removed.
You can find a briefing note here: Trusted person note (updated July 2025) including answers to some questions which can arise.
Sharing well
Changing Futures launched Sharing Well – A guide to sharing and receiving information to assist individuals who seek our help at the National Multiple disadvantages summit, hosted by MEAM at the Birmingham Conference Centre in May. Here, you can read the sharing-well-guide.
Produced by the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Information Governance team, it will support practitioners in their daily interactions with other services, enabling barriers to be unpicked where possible.
Matt Smith, Information Governance Manager said “Confidence in making decisions around sharing information is a hugely important topic, not just for the Council but nationally too. Collaborating with Changing Futures on ‘Sharing Well’ has allowed us to really understand the day-to-day doubts and blockers that make supporting service users more complicated than it needs to be. I hope the documents prove useful and act as a reminder that support is available to help with these decisions when needed”.
There is a one page version for practitioners ‘on the go’ here.
We are planning an accompanying guide called Sharing Well for Risk Owners.
Case studies
Here are some case studies setting out how trusted person approaches can work. It’s a very flexible and will need to adjust depending on the individual at the centre of it, but these examples can help give the idea…
Trusted Person champions
Here you can access
- The trusted-person-champions-pledge
- A guide to trusted person roles
More information on this developing area to come.
If you have any queries about trusted person approaches please email us. We will answer your question and may add it the list of frequently asked questions in the trusted person note.