Practical methods of creating vision and leadership in local partnerships

Local partnerships are based in bureaucracies, making creating a vision for a new way of working highly difficult. Central government has awarded seven local partnerships Systems Change Pilot status for locally‐based partnerships called drug action teams, and this article looks at the opportunity that this has delivered to realign how we create and share a vision of local determinism by focusing on local problem profiles in order to establish a tailored solution. It discusses the use of external expertise to analyse the problem and how this is in itself a form of leadership, both from the external party and the local partnership, increasing decentralisation by delegation of the power to define local determinism.