Start With People: South Yorkshire 2024 - 2028

What hasn’t changed in this refresh, is that at the heart of our role as an Integrated Care Board (ICB) is the commitment to listen consistently to, and collectively act on, the experiences, needs and aspirations of local citizens and communities.

This strategy is our commitment to you about what we will do to make sure we hear from you, actively listen, and most importantly - act on what we hear.

We know that citizen involvement is crucial in improving health outcomes and reducing health inequalities. When communities actively participate in discussions about healthcare it helps health and care providers and commissioners to better understand your needs.

This understanding allows for the development of more effective and inclusive services that address specific challenges faced by different communities.

Citizen involvement fosters trust between communities and health and care services, which is essential for us to be able to effectively promote healthy behaviours to our population and support our communities to make the best use of services.

We know that when you feel involved in decision-making processes regarding your health you are more likely to adhere to treatment plans and seek help when needed. This in turn leads to earlier detection and management of health conditions and then improves health outcomes.

We know that for citizen involvement to be effective it must be appropriately resourced.

Ten principles for working with people and communities

NHS England’s Working in Partnership with people and communities statutory guidance provides 10 principles to follow to build effective partnerships with people and communities. NHS South Yorkshire ICB is committed to following these principles

These principles feature in both our Start with People involvement strategy and also the NHS South Yorkshire ICB constitution. Each year the involvement team works through these principles to identify what actions we need to take to ensure we are meeting the principles.

Action plans can be found in the Get Involved section of our website.

We looked at developing a South Yorkshire version of the principles however feedback from our
citizens and partners when we put together our first Start with People strategy back in 2022 was that we should adopt the national ones.

Ten principles:

1. Put the voices of people and communities (including children and young people) at the centre of decision-making and governance, at every level of the integrated care system.
2. Start engagement early when developing plans and feed back to people and communities how their engagement has influenced activities and decisions.
3. Understand your community’s needs, experience and aspirations for health and care, using engagement to find out if change is having the desired effect.

4. Build relationships with excluded groups, especially those affected by inequalities.

5. Work with Healthwatch and the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector as key partners.
6. Provide clear and accessible public information about vision, plans and progress, to build understanding and trust.
7. Use community development approaches that empower people and communities, making connections to social action.
8. Use co-production, insight and engagement to achieve accountable health and care services.
9. Co-produce and redesign services and tackle system priorities in partnership with people and communities.
10. Learn from what works and build on the assets of all ICS partners – networks, relationships, activity in local places.

Our involvement priorities

• Put the voices of people and communities at the centre of decision-making

This includes: Working with system partners on a coordinated and where possible standardised
approach to citizen involvement; developing a ‘start with people’ minded workforce; ensuring
governance, assurance processes and systems all support this aim and improving communication and feedback to our communities to build understanding and trust.

• Embed mechanisms to enable citizen involvement to play a key role in the system focus on tackling health inequalities

This includes: Working with the VCSE, Healthwatch and partners on an approach for ongoing
insight capturing, particularly from our underserved communities, to ensure we understand our
communities’ needs and empowering our people and communities; ensuring systems and processes are in place for a continuous involvement cycle where citizens can talk to us at any point, in any way, and we will listen and gather their insights and use them to inform our work and developing opportunities for coproduction and working hand in hand with our communities to tackle system priorities.

• Work with people and communities on the priorities identified within the Joint Forward Plan and on transformational change programmes

This includes: Ensuring our future plans involve our citizens, using appropriate involvement levels and approaches, including coproduction and working in partnership with our communities, and consultation where needed.

How our goals and priorities work together

Goals

• To listen consistently to, and collectively act on, the experience and aspiration of local people and communities, as articulated within our Start with People: South Yorkshire strategy.
• Involved communities - to work with our communities so their strengths, experiences, and needs are at the heart of all decision making, one of the three goals of NHS South Yorkshire.
• To listen and coproduce with people and communities a South Yorkshire Integrated Care Partnership Strategy joint commitment.

Priorities

• Priority 1

  • Put the voices of people and communities at the centre of decision making. This links to principles 1, 2 and 3.

• Priority 2
  • Embed mechanisms to enable citizen involvement to play a key role in the system focus on tackling health inequalities. This links to principles 4, 5, 6 and 7.
• Priority 3
  • Work with people and communities on the priorities identified in the Joint Forward Plan. This links to principles 8, 9 and 10.

This is an explanation of some of the names and terms we use in the strategy. 

Insights and the South Yorkshire insights bank

We have an ambition to put our citizens firmly at the heart of all we do, and in order to fulfil that ambition, we need to become more insight led - with a particular focus on citizen insights.

To be an intelligence led system using the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data to inform our decisions it is essential we have the full picture of the health and care needs of our population.

While we have access to a wide range of data about outcomes and performance measures that can tell us about ‘what’ is the problem and ‘how much’ of an issue we have, such data can rarely can tell us ‘why’ we have the problem or to what extent it matters to our population or how we can address it in a way that will meet our citizens’ needs.

We need all three of these things to be an insight led organisation:

Insights provide a deeper understanding of people’s experiences, opinions, beliefs, views, experiences and attitudes. They are typically collected through methods such as interviews, focus groups, and observations, and are analysed using a variety of involvement techniques.

Insights can provide rich and detailed information about people’s experiences and perspectives that may not be captured through data alone. For example, they can help us to better understand the underlying reasons for certain behaviours or attitudes, or provide insight into the emotional impact of a particular experience. Insights are often used in health and care to explore patient experiences, perceptions, and preferences.

They can also be used to inform the development of health and care interventions, policies, and programmes that better meet patient needs and preferences. They are not often gathered as systematically as they could be, or managed in the best way to ensure they inform health and care decisions in the way they could.

Historically within NHS organisations insights are gathered by engagement / involvement teams, typically as part of a service re-design or specific project, rather than routinely as part of ongoing dialogue with our citizens. Similarly experience data has been collected and dealt with on a service-based/ individual issue identification type way, rather than as part of an integrated systematic, connected approach that would enable the data to help influence strategy.

Insights bank

An insights bank is a place to keep insights that organisations collect and to store it for future use.

The purpose of an insights bank is to provide a single location for storing and organising data and insights, making it easier for organisations to access and use the information to inform decision-making. An insights bank can also help ensure that knowledge and insights are not lost or forgotten over time, and can be used to identify trends and patterns over time.

By collecting and storing data and insights in an insights bank, we can more easily track trends, identify areas for improvement, and evaluate the impact of interventions over time.

Our Insights Bank in South Yorkshire will:

• Be co-designed and co-branded so that all organisations in South Yorkshire, including all the NHS organsations, local authorities and VCSE organisations feel ownership of the Insights Bank, use it and contribute to its growth
• Be open access so that anyone can upload insights and anyone can search for insights that would help them
• Protect citizens who have provided insights with anonymisation where needed
• Address the shift that universally citizens and partners tell us they want - ‘don’t come and talk to us when you want to hear something, listen when we’re ready to tell you’.
• Encourage South Yorkshire organisations to work together to gather and share insight, particularly where individuals/organisations are working on the same area or are wanting the answers to the same questions
• Increase the accessibility and value of insight from across the system, through proactively gathering and organising insight
• Maximise our limited resources
• Minimise the burden on communities by supporting an ‘ask once’ approach
• Enable more targeted engagement where gaps or deeper understanding is warranted and ensure we are reaching those we don’t normally hear from
• Support the use of a variety of methods for gathering insight • Help us answer the question “What do we know already?”
• Support an improved approach to the annual refresh of documents such as the NHS South Yorkshire Joint Forward Plan

Insight led system

We have developed this section of our strategy alongside our colleagues who have developed the South Yorkshire Data and Insights Strategy.

The Data and Insights Strategy is pivotal for the journey to build an insight led system in South Yorkshire, which strives to use data to improve the health, wellbeing, outcomes and experiences of our citizens.

The Strategy sets out the commitment to developing a collaborative approach to insight generation across the system, by co-ordinating a system-wide Data and Insight Alliance to make better use of skills, knowledge and capacity across the community; developing a data platform to allow co-creation of insights, which will be derived from both the health and care journeys of our citizens, and the voice of our citizens; and ensuring those insights are easily understandable, and accessible on demand. The ambition is to also go further and use advanced analytical techniques to generate improved insight for decision making.

Within the Data and Insights Strategy, one of the initiatives is to support the development of a data-literate, insight-led health and care system that uses integrated data to unlock insights to understand health inequalities and improve population health. The development of the insights bank sits within this initiative.

Overall the initiative is designed to help the system to greater understand the needs and complexities of the population to better inform design of health and care services. As well as the insights bank this initiative will provide a platform for sharing reports and dashboards across the system; provide improved analytical insights alongside reports and dashboards to draw the user to key points of interest; incorporate more qualitative insights into our analysis including patient voice and experience, the evidence base of ‘what works’ and triangulation with quantitative data; and continually promote an intelligence-led approach to decision making, ensuring data and insights are accessible, understandable and timely.

This wholescale system wide approach will help ensure parity of qualitative insights with data and that the system becomes truly insight led

Why get involved?

Who better to tell you why you should get involved than people who already volunteer their time with us.

"I joined the Cancer Alliance Advisory Board after my own journey with cancer, and as a carer of a friend who died of cancer, as I wanted to use my experiences to help make a difference to services and more importantly, improve the experiences of the patient's and their families and carers. Attending and contributing to the Advisory Board helps to give me a voice in making changes for other patient s and their families."