East and North Hertfordshire CCG Communications and Engagement Strategy November 2019 – March 2021 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 2 About our area ...................................................................................................................................... 2 Our communications and engagement work .................................................................................... 3 Insight ..................................................................................................................................................... 4 Principles of our communications ...................................................................................................... 5 Our channels ......................................................................................................................................... 6 Policy and legal context – our duty to engage ................................................................................. 8 Communications and engagement priorities .................................................................................... 9 Governance ......................................................................................................................................... 17 Monitoring and evaluation ................................................................................................................. 17 Appendices ...................................................................................................................................... 18 Introduction This strategy sets out the proposed communications and engagement priorities of East and North Hertfordshire CCG. The strategy will be reviewed and updated on a regular basis and has an end date of March 2021, when the local health system is due to change significantly. The strategy is designed to support the CCG’s overall strategic objectives and takes into account the NHS Long Term plan and our organisation’s role as a key member of the Hertfordshire and West Essex Sustainability and Transformation Partnership, which is committed to delivering the Long Term Plan’s objectives locally. This is a high level strategy which will be referred to when creating individual communications and engagement plans to ensure a consistent approach. About our area East and North Hertfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is the organisation responsible for commissioning (planning, designing and paying for) NHS services for 597,000 people registered at 57 GP practices across the east and north of Hertfordshire. The CCG is made up of local GPs and health professionals, working together with other clinicians and patients, to decide how the local NHS budget of £724m should be spent. The services commissioned by CCGs include: • planned hospital care • rehabilitative care • urgent and emergency care (including out-of-hours and NHS 111) • most community health services • mental health services and learning disability services • GP services The population of East and North Hertfordshire is diverse and spans five district or borough councils’ areas: Stevenage, Welwyn and Hatfield, East Herts and North Herts, with the exception of Royston, which falls into Cambridge and Peterborough CCG’s area. The health and wellbeing of people in some of our communities is not improving at the same rate as others. Every year, far too many people suffer avoidable ill health or die earlier than they should – this is known as health inequality. These inequalities need to be tackled to make life better for everyone living in our area. Overall, Hertfordshire generally has better health outcomes compared with the rest of the country. This reflects the fact that Hertfordshire is a more prosperous area than average – as we know that health outcomes are closely linked with levels of deprivation. If we compare health outcomes for Hertfordshire with those in other areas that have similar levels of deprivation, there are opportunities for improvement. Reviewing the health of the population of Hertfordshire as a whole can mask the stark differences in people’s health outcomes between and within different district or borough council areas. For example: • Life expectancy for women in east Hertfordshire is two years longer than in north Hertfordshire. In the Welwyn Hatfield area, the life expectancy gap is 8.9 years between the most and least deprived areas of this borough. • More people in the borough of Broxbourne have been diagnosed with diabetes than other areas of the county • Stevenage generally tends to have poorer health outcomes than other districts in the county. • Deaths from heart disease are more common in Stevenage than the rest of Hertfordshire. Hertfordshire’s Director of Public Health has produced a detailed report looking at the state of the county’s health. This is available on Hertfordshire County Council’s website. More information on the makeup of the local area can be found by district at: https://www.hertfordshire.gov.uk/microsites/herts-insight/home.aspx Our communications and engagement work The communications and engagement team aims to support the CCG’s strategic objectives, to support the CCG’s stated mission to: • Reduce health inequalities and achieve a stable and sustainable health economy by working together, sharing best practice and improving expertise and clinical outcomes. • Work with patients, managers and clinical colleagues from all sectors to commission the best possible healthcare for our patients within available resources. The overarching aims and objectives of our communications and engagement activity can be categorised in seven key areas: • Supporting the public and other local stakeholders to understand and access the NHS services they need, reducing health inequalities through the provision of high- quality information and resources. • Working to ensure that CCG staff, volunteers and the third sector feel informed about, engaged with and valued by the organisation. • Supporting the CCG through the commissioning cycle and service changes with high- quality co-production, engagement, consultation and implementation support and advice. • Supporting GP member practices and the newly-developed Primary Care Networks in our CCG area to feel fully engaged with and supported by the organisation. • Protecting and maintaining the reputation of East and North Hertfordshire CCG as a high performing organisation at a time of significant system change. • Supporting the wider health and care system through joined-up information and awareness campaigns including cancer prevention and detection, winter health, flu and NHS 111. • Ensuring that the CCG is fully engaged with the work of the STP, the delivery of the NHS Long Term Plan and the emerging ICS and ICP organisations. Whilst everyone is responsible for maintaining and protecting the good reputation of our CCG, as subject experts, our team supports a wide range of colleagues to develop honest, consistent, concise and informative communications to support the organisation to achieve its objectives and meet its obligations. Our engagement activities were officially assessed as ‘Good’ by the NHS England and Improvement Integrated Assessment Framework in 2019. Our clearly articulated action plan, evidence of ‘you said, we did’ responses to the public and detailed information about the ways we enable residents to get actively involved with the work of the CCG were all praised in the feedback we received. We are working on implementing the assessor’s advice to produce a specific ‘vision’ statement about public involvement, give more assurance at Board level of public involvement activity and the difference it makes, and enhance the evidence and outcomes of the work we undertake to engage with under-represented communities. Insight Understanding the information needs of the different groups of people we serve, known in communications terms as our ‘audiences’, is essential to our communications and engagement work. Through our awareness of people’s attitudes, habits, behaviours and preferences we can ensure our communications are as meaningful and effective as possible. A stakeholder analysis and mapping exercise will be carried out during the planning process for every communications and engagement campaign. Our experience of listening and talking with a range of stakeholders and assessing the effectiveness of various communications methods or ‘channels’ helps to guide our team as we consider what channels are the most appropriate for each task and how each demographic likes to receive information. For example: • The circulation and news content of traditional printed local newspapers are in decline. Online newspaper content has a sizeable audience but stories need to be short and visual in order to be taken up by news editors. • New technologies and a more fragmented media landscape are giving people more control over when and how they access content. As a result, we need to work harder to break through the noise and engage with these groups. • There are greater time pressures and competing demands on our audiences than ever before, which means that our communications have to be as relevant and engaging as possible. • Societal factors like longer life expectancy, changing family make-up, household structure and shifts in traditional ‘life stages’ now demand more sophisticated segmentations of our audiences in order