NHS Long Term Plan Consultation
In 2019, national health & social care consumer champion Healthwatch England (HWE) secured funding from NHS England (NHSE) for local Healthwatch to support public engagement and contribute to local development plans for the 10 Year Forward View. The NHS Long Term Plan is drawn up by frontline staff, patients groups, and national experts to outline how the NHS will move forward to meet the changing health & wellbeing needs of the population over the next 10 years.
HWE commissioned us as local champions to be the coordinating organisation in our local Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) area (for Torbay, Plymouth and Devon), to engage with our local population and service providers to gather their views about the NHS Long Term Plan.
We worked in collaboration with our neighbouring Healthwatch and STP Engagement Leads to ensure effective engagement in the wider Devon area. This included planning group meetings to review the NHSE Surveys, plan engagement, media and marketing activities and to identify and agree on the priority areas within the Devon STP footprint.
To find out what local people thought about the NHS Long Term Plan and to enable us to feed this back to HWE, our local STP and NHS England (NHSE), we used two methods; focus group workshop sessions in the local community and surveys developed nationally by NHSE. NHSE surveys and focus group workshop dates were shared via social media, e-news, websites, local newsletters, plus carers and community networks to ensure the community had an opportunity to share their views.
In total, there were 540 general survey responses, 221 specific condition survey responses, and 170 attendees on the focus group workshops across Devon – nearly 1,000 people.
The views we gather will be fed into the development of the NHS’s local plan explaining how they will deliver the priorities set out in the NHS Long Term Plan. The NHS will explain how they have responded to these views in the plans they produce.
To view the report showing exactly what people told us please click here.
This information is extremely important as we start to shape our Long Term Plans for the future. We have learned a great deal from this work which we believe will help us do things better in the future.
In terms of the engagement, having the flexibility to do things that suit local systems is important. Aligning national resources with local knowledge will certainly create a better outcome for all.