The IBISES model in practice
Six steps that make the role possible
Identify, build, invest, support, empower, sustain: what each step needs, and what fails when it is skipped.
The IBISES model is the framework that makes a link worker post work. The acronym names six steps: Identify community, Build relationships, Investment in training, Support link workers, Empower through co-production, Sustain relationships.
The steps are a sequence, but they repeat. Each study ran them again with a new community. Read the model as a checklist for the team, not as a task for the link worker alone.
Step 1: Identify the community and the people who represent it
What the step needs
- Named community organisations with charitable status or a clear community mandate, not a mailing list.
- People inside those organisations who can vouch for the project and hold its boundaries.
- An honest answer to: who is missing from this community, and who speaks for the quiet part of it?
What fails when it is skipped
The team recruits a convenience group, calls it the community, and reports findings that describe the loudest and most connected members. In the IBISES projects, the Roma community depended on a very small number of key individuals. That made the partnership hard to sustain. The lesson is not to avoid the small community. It is to say out loud where the dependency sits.
Step 2: Build relationships and trust
Relationship building takes months, not weeks. In the prostate cancer case, the team spent about 12 months developing a relationship with one community organisation before the first meeting. Trust was built through phone calls, attending events, turning up in person, and a webinar that named historical injustices in research and explained the safeguards that now exist.
What works
- One researcher takes the relationship, and keeps it. Changing contact resets trust.
- Listen first, and change your plan in response to what you hear. Two of the case studies changed their recruitment or their focus after community advice.
- Accept discomfort. The ethnography of the model records that the process involved "cold conversations", mixed feelings and the search for the right organisation, and that one participant valued the discomfort of it.
- Respect protective gatekeepers. Community organisations guard their members. That is a function, not an obstacle.
Step 3: Invest in training
The published projects ran a half-day interactive session covering research types and principles, ethics and data protection, and practical skills such as running consultations and focus groups. Project-specific training followed: prostate cancer in one study, lung health in another.
Half a day is enough to start a trained helper. It is not enough to build an assessable competence. This course exists because the published model under-specifies the training, and because a certificate needs evidence that a half-day cannot produce. The course keeps the model's principle: build on community expertise, do not replace it.
Investment means money as well as time
- Pay for training hours at the same rate as working hours.
- Pay for travel, childcare and data.
- Train in the community, at a time the community chooses.
- Give materials in a form people can keep and revisit.
Step 4: Support link workers throughout the study
Support is the step most often cut. The IBISES papers describe what it looked like when it was done well: weekly or regular team meetings with an open, non-hierarchical atmosphere, one-to-one check-ins, and supervision sessions that dealt directly with the tension between being a community representative and a team member.
The support structure that worked
- A named academic who holds the relationship and is reachable.
- Regular whole-team meetings where link workers hear the same information as researchers.
- Private one-to-one check-ins, where a person can say what they would not say in the group.
- Facilitated discussion when a conflict appears, aimed at a solution that serves both the community and the research.
- Two link workers per community where possible. The model found that pairs shared the workload and supported each other, and moved to this arrangement after the first study.
- Debrief after every activity, with reflective notes from both sides.
Step 5: Empower through co-production
Link workers influenced the protocol. They did not merely deliver it. In the priority-setting studies they joined at protocol development and helped shape the questions. In established studies they joined at recruitment, were oriented to the whole protocol, and advised on culturally appropriate adaptation.
The distinction that keeps this honest is influence over implementation versus influence over the question. A link worker who can change how a focus group is run, but never what is asked, holds delegated delivery, not co-production. Say which one you have.
Step 6: Sustain the relationship
Studies end. Relationships should not. The IBISES projects reported outcomes that outlived the funding: a prostate cancer support group that became the first of its kind in the north of England, an equality and diversity advisory panel drawn from link workers, and link workers who went on to academic study and academic posts.
Sustaining takes four forms
- Feedback. Tell participants and the community what the study found, in plain language, through channels the community uses.
- Credit. Name link workers in outputs and support them to present.
- Continuity of contact. Keep one named person reachable after the study closes.
- Next work. Bring the community into the next application rather than starting again with a new community.
The operational items the model insists on
The IBISES paper names four practical requirements that decide whether the model can run at all.
- Cost the model in the funding application. Training, support and payment are budget lines, not goodwill.
- Put payment systems in place. Where possible, pay a lump sum to the partner organisation, so institutional payment systems do not block payment to individuals, and so vouchers are not needed.
- Name the team members who will train and support link workers. A role with no named trainer is a role with no support.
- Write a memorandum of understanding with the partner organisation, covering expectations on both sides.
The check before you start
Ask four questions. If you cannot answer all four in writing, the post is not ready.
- Who trains, and on what dates?
- Who supervises, and on what rhythm?
- Who pays, how much, and by what route?
- What can this person change, and what can they not change?
Where the evidence is thin
The model rests on four studies in South Yorkshire, with small numbers and one region. The published papers say so. The effect on communities was assessed mostly through community organisation staff, not through the participants themselves. Training was described, not evaluated against an assessment. This course is designed to be assessable precisely because that gap is real. It does not inherit evidence that the gap has been closed.