Our framework for involvement

Our communications and engagement strategy illustrates our commitment to involving you, setting out our approach, our duties and our processes for doing this. It contributes to our wider decision making arrangements, in line with our CCG constitution and it plays an important role in our ladder of assurance for patient and public involvement.

Here’s how we embed involvement into our daily business:

Lay representative

We have a lay representative dedicated to patient and public involvement on our Governing Body, where our most important work is debated and approved.

Governing Body 

Our Governing Body is made up of doctors, nurses and other health professionals. The chair of Sefton Healthwatch is a co-opted member of the committee, along with a Sefton Council representative. We hold bi-monthly Governing Body meetings in public, where residents are invited to hear members discussing and making decisions about our work. Ahead of the start of these formal meeting, there is an opportunity for people to ask any questions or queries they have.

GP practice localities

Our organisation works across four geographical GP practice localities. These are well established forums, chaired by doctors and where our member practices participate in and influence our work. Practices also use these forums to feedback service and patient experience issues for action. Quarterly wider group meetings provide a further forum for practices to get involved in CCG business.

Quality Committee

We have a Quality Committee and one of its main areas of responsibility is overseeing patient experience. Our Quality Strategy describes this. The committee provides our Governing Body with direct assurance of the experience our patients receive from the services we commission, holding providers to account and taking action when this falls below what we expect.

EPEG, our engagement and patient experience group 

Our engagement and patient experience group, EPEG reports to our Governing Body via our Quality Committee. It is a Sefton wide group bringing us together with a range of partners from across health and care where we test our involvement plans and outcomes. We also review patient experience data and involvement plans from our providers, escalating any issues to our Quality Committee.    

Other committees and processes

Processes and systems for involvement are embedded in some of our most important committees such as our Corporate Governance and Clinical Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention committees and the strategies, policies and protocols that underpin their work, including our disinvestment policy and procedures.

Principles for involvement  

Our communications and engagement strategy sets out our principles for involvement based on national good practice and locally agreed standards.

Testing and consulting on our plans 

We test our involvement plans with Sefton Council's Engagement and Consultation Standards Panel, inviting comments and feedback from this well established partnership forum, which we are also members of. We also have a duty to to consult Sefton Council's Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSC) on our involvement plans whenever we are planning a substantial change or variation in services. In addition, we provide updates on our work and attend every OSC for Adult Social Care and Health. 

Involvement exercises

We design and carry out specific involvement exercises for different aspects of our work, particularly when we are planning changes to a service now or in the future, including pre and post equality impact assessments. We also use a number of accessibility tools to ensure as many of our residents as possible can get involved in our work.  

'Co-production' - working together with our public and partners

Whenever appropriate, we invite patient, public or carer representatives to get directly involved in our day to day commissioning work, such as taking part in current exercises, procurement processes or joining our working groups to enable services and programmes to be ‘co-produced’. Our volunteer policy supports this.

Big Chat events

Our regular public Big Chat events where we bring people together to discuss our work, ask for their views about our plans and feedback how we have used their comments and experiences so far. We hold ‘Big Chat style’ annual general meetings to make these sessions as meaningful and useful as possible for our residents.

Patient Participation Groups 

Many GP practices have patient participation groups (PPGs). These enable patients to have greater participation in their local NHS.

Annual reports

Each year we report on our engagement and consultation activities and their outcomes in our annual report and accounts to provide assurance against our duties to involve you, which are described in detail in our communications and engagement strategy.