Involvement of people
Involvement of People
Encouraging system partners to consider and involve local people in decision making and service design – through co-design, co-production and enabling and empowering local people and communities to lead on making improvements themselves – will ensure that services truly serve their local communities
What do we want to achieve?
Ultimately, more effective services, and those which work better for the people who use them.
To achieve this, we believe that:
- High-quality service user feedback should be a required and welcomed element in all service decision making – people know where to take feedback to make it effective, there is proof user feedback improves services and feedback is everyone’s business and welcomed.
- All service user groups should be ‘heard’ in ways that work for them – people are listened to equally and processes enable them to feedback without fear of repercussions.
Recent work under this priority:
Hospitals Feedback Project
- In 2023 we visited hospitals and across Surrey and gathered experiences about peoples’ knowledge and understanding of feedback mechanisms and barriers to giving feedback.
- We asked each hospital to respond to our recommendations and every hospital said what changes they would make
- We revisited the project a year after it completed and held each Trust to account; asking them to update on the actions they’d committed to in the short term and reviewing the long-term changes that were planned.
- In March 2025, we were shortlisted for a Healthwatch Impact award for this work.
Neurodivergent people’s experiences of outpatients in Surrey Hospitals
- This project relates to neurodivergent people’s experiences in outpatients in Surrey hospitals and involved interviews and a survey. We have presented the findings at hospital patient experience meetings and there has been interest across our hospitals and health and social care system.
- In 2025 we will revisit actions and improvements from the Surrey Hospitals.
Individual reports and responses from the trusts can be found on our reports page under the Involvement of people reports section, as well as our summary video presentation.
Our current work under this priority:
- In 2025 we will continue to find out people’s awareness of giving feedback and will engage with priority populations e.g Black and Minority Ethnic Groups and people with long term health conditions.
- We will continue to challenge change by revisiting previous report recommendations such as neurodiverse people’s experiences of outpatients in Surrey Hospitals
- We are embarking on a project to find out whether the healthcare needs of housebound people are being met by the current healthcare system.
Other reports and bulletins relating to this priority can be found under the Involvement of people category of our reports section on our website.
Contact: Julie.callin@healthwatchsurrey.co.uk