Our priorities

We champion the voice of local people to shape, improve and get the best from NHS, health and social care services. As an independent statutory body, we have the power to make sure decision makers listen to the experiences of local people.

Prioritising helps us to focus our resources and be clear with the health and social care commissioners and services about what we plan to work on and where additional resources will be needed to enable us to provide insight and support.

Our core priorities, as the name suggests, are at the heart of what we do and tend to be fixed from year to year, but our thematic priorities are changeable, based on what we are hearing from local people and set as areas for us to focus our resources on.

To decide our thematic priorities, we listened carefully across our community engagement, Helpdesk, advocacy, volunteers and Surrey residents to identify and shape our priority areas for 3 years (2023 – 2026).

This process began in November 2022 with a “horizon scanning” session where our volunteers, Board Directors and staff team came together to review what we were hearing from local people; what we knew about system priorities; where we felt there was a risk of people being less well-heard and at risk of health inequality; and where we felt we could have most influence and impact. We then applied a Theory of Change model, examining what we’d want to influence in the long term, and what we need to do to achieve that change over time. Our Local Healthwatch Advisory Group reviewed our proposed priority areas, and our overall Luminus Insight CIC Board approved their recommendations at a meeting in public in April 2023.

Our core priorities are:

• Agenda free listening and feeding back insight
• Information and signposting.

Our thematic priorities are:

• Access to primary care
• Social care
• Mental health
• Involvement of people: the listening landscape

In addition we also ensure that we:

• Amplify voice within the VCSE (Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise) sector
• Assess our long term impact.

Our current work plan for 2024 – 2025 highlights our planned activities and outcomes for this year. This, along with our Priorities and Work Plan 2023 – 2026, are in our Reports section of our website which also holds reports relating to each of the priorities and our Quarterly impact reports.

The boxes below provide more detail on the work and projects being undertaken in each of our thematic priorities.