The North East London Community Insights Project with local Healthwatch
We're proud to have been working with the North East London Integrated Care Board and System and the eight local Healthwatch organisations (Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets, Redbridge, Newham, Havering, Hackney, City of London, and Barking and Dagenham) since 2020 to build and enhance the NEL Community Insights System (CIS).
Our goal has been to improve health and care services more quickly by collating, comparing, and reporting on community experiences of these services. The NEL CIS now holds nearly 90,000 comments from local residents that equate to over 300,000 separately coded issues. This wealth of information provides regular trend analysis and highlights residents' experiences of health and care services.
One of the key factors in our success has been the ability to access feedback and insight immediately. This has enabled the ICS to better understand the needs and aspirations of local people, to help tackle health inequalities and improve health outcomes.
Working with the local Healthwatch organisations has been vital to the success of the CIS. Their expertise, advice, and links to the local community are of huge value to the ICS. The collaborative working is funded by the ICB and enables Healthwatch to gather, enter, and code the insights and produce the reports.
A huge benefit has been the ability to access and use insight from people to strategically target further engagement where it’s needed, to understand issues in more depth, and to coordinate this across the system. This has helped develop an understanding of local communities and built trust.
The CIS allows stakeholders to produce and circulate a range of regular quarterly reports and summary dashboards at North East London and Place Based Partnership level. These reports show positive and negative change over time across a range of patient experience measures in relation to integrated care, GPs and hospitals, as well as priority areas such as long-term conditions and mental health.See report examples here https://www.northeastlondonhcp.nhs.uk/Insight/healthwatch-and-community-insights.htm
"The community insights are used in all parts of the ICS system and underpin the creation and delivery of our Integrated Care Strategy and our ability to hear local voices. The work has brought partners together from across North East London, allowing us to access a wide range of views from local people quickly that we can then use as the foundation to plan and further improve services with a range of stakeholders. Gathering volumes of feedback is one thing, but insight is so much more meaningful when it’s coded and managed carefully. Working closely with Healthwatch to do this has been a great success."
Charlotte Pomery, Chief Participation and Place Officer for North East London ICB
The partnership between NEL ICB and the Healthwatch has been pivotal to the development and success of the Community Insights System and will continue in 2023/24 with a further investment in an enhanced insight offer from the system.
We have attached the report for your convenience. We hope you find the information useful and informative.