The AMBIT project is increasingly busy, which is a Good Thing, but carries its own challenges.
The thinking behind developing a really good internet-based manual/training resource is about developing ways to disseminate the guts of good-ideas-that-help cheaply and widely (Jeremy Ruston, inventor or TiddlyWiki, describes how a web based manual offers up a "large surface area" for minimal cost)...
So it seems to me that any other model of dissemination of effective practice needs to justify itself against these criteria, but for our part the challenge is to find ways to disseminate practice that is (and remains) demonstrably effective. The circle that needs squaring is how to deliver sufficient oversight and supervision to provide some assurance of qualitative positive and sustainable change, without making the whole operation so expensive that only populations with sufficient wealth can access it.
Part of our approach (in keeping with the AMBIT principle of "Respect for Local Practice and Expertise") is to emphasise the empowerment of local supervisory structures, and to encourage these to engage in the act of "auto-manualization" - documenting their own sense of "what we do well" and measuring outcomes ("Respect for Evidence") to validate this. This is why we avoid the idea of an "AMBIT team" - but prefer to think of local teams developing local excellence, influenced by, or building over the foundations in AMBIT. The AMBIT project is quite happy to be the ditch-digger and drain-layer for the development by local teams of dwelling places that offer excellent, culturally-attuned and effective service!
Another part of our approach is to try to develop webinar/online supervision resources that can be accessed from afar by AMBIT Leads in local teams - this is a work in progress and we hope to get it going early in 2013.
Another part of the dissemination quest is obviously talking about the model, and we seem to have been doing a lot of that recently. In the last three months of 2012 AMBIT and tiddlymanuals will have been presented at AACAP in San Francisco, London, Peterborough, Norwich, Oslo, Stockholm, Geneva. We are training teams at full capacity, too. Most recently 3 new teams in Norwich which are novel, multiagency (statutory and voluntary sector) teams that will purposefully span an extended age-range of teens to mid twenties, a service development that Norfolk should be congratulated for embracing in such a bold innovative way. We have a cluster of other statutory and non-statutory teams for training in London in the coming fortnight, then large numbers of practitioners in Belfast in the New Year... bookings stretching out into summer 2013, in fact!
So AMBIT has become very much more of a "thing", even though it is not really trying to be a thing, but a broad approach that supports local teams to develop and innovate in ways that combine and build upon something that approaches (we hope) closer and closer to the ideal of "evidence-based practice". These are exciting times, and the AMBIT project is having to address internal challenges relating to the expansion of its administrative, training and supervisory capacities. We are growing up, I guess.
