Engagement and Involvement Annual Review 2023–2024

Our Engagement and Involvement Annual Review

We are passionate about involving local people in designing, developing, and improving health care. Engagement is at the heart of the Trust’s approach to building relationships with communities and hearing directly from patients, their families, and local people.

We believe that this is a powerful way to improve access to services and achieve better outcomes and experience of care. We work in partnership with other organisations across Gloucestershire and under the umbrella of the One Gloucestershire “Working with People and Communities Strategy.”

Over the past year, we have undertaken a wide range of work including improving uptake rates in cervical screening in South Asian communities and improving the care of vulnerable and homeless people in our Emergency Departments.

Our Young Influencers provide a great example of how young people themselves can provide direct and actionable feedback on how services can be improved. They visited our Children’s Emergency Department at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital and have made a set of observations to the department and patient experience team. They are also building a relationship with other community youth organisations to increase the reach of young voices being heard by the Trust.

We are grateful to the Gloucestershire Hospitals charity for providing start-up funding for our community outreach worker and having the confidence to allow us to prove its worth. With their support, we have now been able to extend our resources to fund a small core team of community support workers with a big reach

Executive summary

Our annual review celebrates not just some of our achievements, but the cornerstone of all our work – collaboration. We believe that building and maintaining strong relationships between our services and the communities we serve, improves the quality and access to health and care services.

In 2023 we celebrated the 75 Windrush anniversary, many of whom dedicated their lives to building our communities and our health system. We also celebrated the NHS 75 anniversary, with a range of community and staff events to mark the occasion, and provided the opportunity to reflect on the incredible work that has been achieved together.

Working in partnership with our community isn’t simply a box to tick; it’s the key to unlocking better health outcomes. By understanding the needs for local people, we can transform our services and empower communities to focus on what matters most to them, helping to shape how healthcare is delivered for everyone.

This report explores our engagement and involvement work over the past year, outlining some of our achievements, our challenges and the future priorities the next 12 months. We have also continued to improve our Engagement and Involvement Tracker, providing a roadmap for how we work and demonstrating the impact it has had and how it has influenced how we work.

Although our work to strengthen how we involved communities began just before the pandemic, our biggest impact has been seen following the introduction of our community outreach project from early 2022, funded by NHS Charities Together. This has made a huge impact in how we can support and listen to so many local people and communities and transformed how we do this.

Our work has played a pivotal role in helping people who live in some of our under-served communities to access essential health and care support. This has been done in partnership with other local organisations and groups across Gloucestershire and we know it has improved the lives of many people, who may sometimes be at risk of not being picked up by health and care services.

We are also delighted this year that the Chair of our Young Influencers was elected to the Council of Governors and that the group has continued to develop and provide learning opportunities and improvement for key services, including the new Children’s Emergency Department.

The Trust also hosted visits over the last 12 months, including the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, who visited our new Chedworth Surgical Unit and theatres at Cheltenham General Hospital and HRH Princess Royal Visit who visited the Stroud Maternity Unit. These visits provide an opportunity for staff and partners to proudly show the work they do and how they provide care for local people.

Highlights of our engagement and involvement programme during 2023/24 include:

• Collaboration in partnership with ICB to film a Bowel Cancer Screening Film.
• Community Collaboration with Mindsong.
• Community-Led Health Research: Young Influencers
• Development of new Audio Guides in partnership with the Gloucestershire Sight Loss Council to improve navigation and access across our hospitals.
• Continued partnership with Inclusion Gloucestershire and Healthwatch Gloucestershire to focus on key issues that matter to local people and communities, ensuring greater collaboration;
• Continued to support and engage the 2,000 members of the Trust, with regular newsletters, public events, and Annual Members Meetings;

The Trust is part of the One Gloucestershire Partnership, which is made up of other health, social care and Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations. One Gloucestershire has a really important ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with our VCS partners – reinforcing how we will all continue to work together for local people.

We want local people to help us design, develop and improve services by sharing their views and experiences and we believe the people we listen to and involve need to reflect the communities we serve. We know that many people are often not heard and to ensure our services meet the needs of everyone, we work creatively and accessibly to reach those whose voices are too often ignored or not sought.

The support of local people is crucial for the success of our work, and we are grateful for the valuable feedback, innovative ideas, and unique perspectives that help shape our services and how we work.