Patient and public involvement reminder

There is a lot to digest in NHS England’s Strategic Commissioning Framework published last month. 
   
Buried away in it, at paragraph 4.5, is a helpful reminder about user involvement and co -design.
 
It states that for services to truly meet the needs of communities, people must be involved from the start of planning through to implementation and review. 
 
It recommends that each Integrated Care Board has a systematic approach to co-production – meaningfully involving patients, service users, unpaid carers and community groups in co-designing solutions. 
 
The guidance explains that this goes beyond formal consultation and means working with people as partners and states that ICBs will need to:

• Ensure that focused effort and resources are deployed to reach seldom heard and underserved people and communities, working with trusted community partners to achieve this.
• Make best use of the skills, capability, capacity and expertise across the health and care system in carrying out these duties alongside their own.
   

There are several other pieces of guidance that are referred to:

•  NHS England’s guidance on working with people and communities (10 principles to support ICBs to develop their approaches and put the voices of staff, people and communities at the heart of decision-making)
• The experience of care improvement framework (to better understand how organisations across the system are listening, valuing, understanding and improving experiences of care in partnership with other stakeholders, for example VCSE)
• NHS England’s framework for involving patients in patient safety
• Patient safety healthcare inequalities reduction framework and improvement framework: community language translation and interpreting services.

In conclusion, it states that involving people from the start and throughout the commissioning process helps ensure that decisions meet the needs of local communities, building on people’s experiences of existing services and the range of health assets in communities. 
 
Readers are reminded that being able to demonstrate how people have been involved in decisions can help avoid legal challenges to proposed changes to services and is essential where the duty to involve and consult applies.