Some lessons concerning agency transformation towards personalised services

The International Initiative for Mental Health Leadership (IIMHL) is a joint endeavour involving eight countries, and aims to facilitate the sharing of best practices and to provide support and collaboration for leaders of mental health services to develop robust and effective managerial and operational practices. The ultimate aim is to improve services for people who use them. An article from the IIMHL is included in every issue of The International Journal of Leadership in Public Services.This paper describes the key learning outcomes that came from the examination of the experience of eight American community‐based agencies that altered their service practices from an exclusive reliance on group and fixed models of service, to models of service that were exclusively individualised for the entirety of the people they served. It examines the key lessons learned as to what drove this process and what did not, as well as what some of the critical comparative outcomes were. A significant core factor cited repeatedly was values‐based leadership from within the agency concerned and a key result was that individualised services for every person served were very cost competitive in the systems they were in.