Agenda item

·       Community Impact Bucks – Improving Partnership Working: Rachel Stanton.

·       Healthwatch Annual Report: Jenny Baker, Chair of Healthwatch Bucks.

Healthwatch Annual Report

Jenny Baker, Chair of Healthwatch Bucks, provided a presentation, appended to the minutes.  Jenny advised that Healthwatch Bucks was legally obliged to produce an annual report.  The report provided a high level summary of what had been carried out during last year, particularly in response to the pandemic.  Healthwatch Bucks was a publicly funded independent champion for the residents of Buckinghamshire and received funding from the Council for their core contract.  The three year contract from April 2020 also included Independent Complaints Health Advocacy and community engagement.  Healthwatch Bucks was supported by Healthwatch England and collaborated with the ICP and the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector.  A summary slide provided the results from the work carried out last year, much of which was carried out online due to lockdown. Healthwatch Bucks had been awarded ‘highly commended’ by Healthwatch England for their work with veterans.  Their priorities for 2021-21 were the Covid 19 response and recovery, mental health and primary and community care, with cross-cutting themes across all of these in lesser - heard voices and integrated care. 

The Chairman thanked Healthwatch Bucks for their work during the pandemic and emphasised the importance of hearing the voice of service users and residents and asked Jenny to provide an update for every agenda.

Resolved:  The Board noted the work and achievements of Healthwatch Bucks in 2020/21, noted Healthwatch Bucks plans and priorities for 2021/22 and considered how Healthwatch Bucks could further help the Health and Wellbeing Board and health and social care providers ensure the residents’ voice was well represented in decisions made about health and social care during recovery from Covid-19 and beyond.

Community Impact Bucks – Improving Partnership Working

Rachel Stanton, Programme Manager for the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West (BOB) VCSE Alliance and Health Partnership Programme, provided a presentation, appended to the minutes.  Rachel stated that the leadership programme was responsible for developing and maximising the contribution that the VCSE played within the regional BOB wide health structures.  It aimed to facilitate better partnership working between Health and Social Care and the VCSE sector and supported the development of a VCSE leadership ‘alliance’ at a system level, with mechanisms for feeding into all levels of decision making across the ICS.  It was expected that by April 2022, the ICPs and the ICS NHS body would develop a formal agreement for engaging and embedding the VCSE sector in the system level governance and decision-making arrangement, ideally working through a VCSE alliance to reflect the diversity of the sector.  Since Covid, the NHS and VCSE had been able to reach out to the harder to reach communities that sometimes the statutory organisations did not have the capacity to work towards engaging.   A work shop had been held recently, the details would be published, and a formal agreement would be developed.  There was a commitment to involving the VCSE in the ICS governance and to formalise the VCSE as a strategic partner supporting the functions in the ICS to deliver integrated care.  There was also a commitment to involve the VCSE in shaping the plans to tackle wider determinants of health and to have a role in population health management to capture and share intelligence data from communities into the ICS alongside Healthwatch.  A diagram was shown of where the VCSE Leadership Group Alliance sat in the new health structure and what the BOB-wide Alliance would do. The launch of the first VCSE alliance meeting had been held and several organisations/people had signed up and four sub-groups would be established which would then feed into the ICS workstream.  The Alliance would continue to map members, develop relationships with the ICS and the ICP, continue to interpret NHS England’s development framework and develop the formal agreement between the VCSE Alliance and ICS.

The following key points were raised in discussion:

• Martin Gallagher, CEO, Clare Foundation and Katie Higginson, CEO, Community Impact Bucks, offered to their help to reach out to smaller organisations to ensure an inclusive forum.
• Jenny Baker stressed the importance of aligning national health and social care organisations which had local representation with the Alliance, as they were an important channel for collecting the views of patients.  Rachel advised she had already started engaging with some of the organisations but there was still a way to go and would be a priority in the next six months.
• Katie Higginson summarised that there had been some excellent examples of collaborative work between the health partners and voluntary sector over the last year and that Rachel’s role was to work across the BOB area to draw the threads together and create a structure at a regional level.

The Chairman thanked Jenny and Rachel for their presentations.