The NHS Gloucestershire Working with people and communities Strategy sets out our principles, how we will work, and the mechanisms we will use to ensure we are putting the people and communities of Gloucestershire at the heart of everything we do.

This Strategy outlines how we will ensure we meet NHS Gloucestershire’s duty to involve people and communities in our work.

The Strategy sets out the approach we will take towards:

  • 1. Involving people and communities (governance)
  • 2. Involving you
  • 3. Working with people and communities to tackle inequalities
  • 4. Working with Healthwatch Gloucestershire and with voluntary and community organisations and groups
  • 5. Communicating with you

Insight

We want to ensure that we involve people in a variety of different ways and will be open and transparent in our work. We want their involvement to be meaningful. There are some exciting new developments planned during the first year of the ICS:

Insight Hub: online space, a ‘library’, where all Insight (reported feedback from local people and communities) can be kept together in one place. Its purpose is to assist the ICS to access current Insight from across the areas with the aim of avoiding duplication and involvement fatigue.

Citizens Panel: We are planning to recruit a group of more than 1000 local residents to join a Citizens Panel. The Panel will be made up of a group of individuals, whose anonymous feedback will be used at a county and a more local level to shape health and care services and support. People recruited will be representative of the Gloucestershire population of approximately 650,000 people. The Panel will include people who live in priority areas of the county; where people experience greater health inequalities than elsewhere in Gloucestershire.

Storytelling: We want to encourage people to tell us their stories so that we can learn from their real experiences about what went well, what could have been improved and get new ideas. Stories will usually take the form of narrative interviews or audio-visual productions and it is our intention to begin each ICB Board meeting with a Story.

Governance

In Gloucestershire we believe that working with people and communities is everyone’s business not just a handful of people with “involvement, engagement, experience or communications” in their job title.  This ethos supports people across the ICS whose role it is to ensure local people can get involved and that we learn from Insight.

Local people’s voices will be heard across the ICS from Boards to Integrated Locality Partnerships to focused working groups. Your voices will be heard alongside those of clinicians and managers, when we are planning, developing, procuring, evaluating and monitoring services. We aim to be clear about what you can and cannot influence, explain where there is scope for local decision making, or where we must follow actions mandated by others.

We bring our knowledge of your care to look at how services are planned and how your journey through care can be improved. Combining this clinical knowledge with your first-hand insights, and those of communities in Gloucestershire, provides a unique collaboration. We believe that the combination of this local clinical knowledge, together with the knowledge you have regarding your own experiences, and communities have about their particular circumstances, will lead to evidence and experience-based commissioning and design of services. The following diagram illustrates examples of the network which enables insight from local people’s and communities’ to be heard within the ICS in order to inform planning, commissioning and decision making.

Meetings held in public

We are committed to working in an open and transparent way and want to make sure that people can learn about all the work of the ICS. During the COVID 19 pandemic this has involved holding ICS Partner Board/Governing Body meetings in public with live streaming.

We will hold the NHS Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board Meeting (and other ICS Partner Board Meetings) in public. Meetings dates and Meetings agendas, minutes and papers will be published in advance on the ICB website.

Information about how to submit public questions to the Integrated Care Board Meeting will be provided on the ICB website. All Integrated Care Board Meetings will commence with a patient insights and discussion.