About

The agreement is designed for working together in an Integrated Care System but can be adapted for local Healthwatch working together on other issues.

How to use this template

You should customise the template to meet the needs of your group of local Healthwatch who are working in partnership.  To do this, you’ll need to refer to the ICS collaboration toolkit and the data protection guidance. 

You’ll need to consider the following: 

• Whether a lead organisation is necessary: this might be needed if funding comes from the ICS for projects. 
• Who is going to deal with safeguarding issues that arise, particularly from joint research or engagement projects?
• Who is going to be responsible for dealing with any data subject access requests for jointly gathered data?
• Who will be responsible for taking action on any data breaches for jointly gathered data?

• How long will the data sharing agreement will run for? You may need to take into account the length of Healthwatch contracts to do this. 

Where part of the template is highlighted in yellow, you will need to customise the content to the needs of your group of Healthwatch.

Other actions

Do a data protection impact assessment

Each local Healthwatch will need to undertake a Data Protection Impact Assessment for sharing data across an ICS area to consider the impact of doing so, and what mitigations might need to be taken. 

Read the guidance

Update your online privacy notice

Your online privacy notice needs to be updated to include the fact that you’ll be sharing data with other local Healthwatch, what data you are sharing and with which local Healthwatch. You’ll also need to ensure that you include information on data retention periods for shared data and data gathered in joint projects. Our privacy notice template contains a relevant section for you to include.

Download the template

About

Data protection legislation requires you to explain to people how you will your their information. 

You need to inform people participating in engagement events and research activities (such as interviews, focus groups or surveys) how you'll use their data and the lawful basis for doing so . If you use cards or forms to obtain public feedback, you'll need to provide this information on paper.

It is best practice to start a survey or interview with an explanation of the project, what information you are looking for and how you will use the data. 

To help you meet this requirement, we have developed two templates for you to use when engaging people on the phone or face-to-face.

About

The Data Protection Act 2018 and General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) establish a framework to regulate the processing of personal data.

The legislation balances the legitimate need for organisations to process personal data with the rights and interests of individuals.

In the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office ensures that organisations comply with data protection legislation and take enforcement action where the law is broken.

This guidance sets out how you can comply with data protection legislation. It also links to templates you can use.

The guidance covers:

• Why you need to comply with the legislation
• Data controllers, processors and data protection officers
• The governance issues that you’ll need to take to comply
• How to collect data lawfully
• How to use data lawfully
• How to store data lawfully
• What to do in the event of a data breach
• Data subject rights
• A glossary of data protection terms

The latest version (January 2023) includes additional detail on consent and explicit consent, and how to word consent.

GDPR training

Our bespoke training course will introduce you to the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), what the law says, what it means for Healthwatch and how to apply it to your work.

Seperate learning modules are available for Healthwatch Lead Officers and Healthwatch staff.

Find out more

About

A data protection policy sets out how you will keep data safe and comply with data protection laws. 

This template sets out what you need to cover in your data protection policy.

The policy helps to explain:

• Why we collect data;
• What data do we collect and why;
• How do we use people's information following the law;
• How long do we keep data;
• How we keep data safe;
• What we do if there is a data breach;
• Who we share data with;
• How people can ask to see the data we hold about them or ask us to amend or stop storing it.

Step one: The Annual Survey

What is the Annual Survey?

Our network has achieved so much over the last few years, even in the face of challenging circumstances. It’s important that you get the right support to run a high-quality local service. That’s why we need to understand how things work on the ground for you and the constraints you face.

The Annual Survey gives us a bird’s eye view of local engagement, resources, funding, reach and impact. As well as targeted support, the information helps us protect and generate income, support new partnerships, and report to Parliament through our annual report.

How can you complete the Annual Survey?

The survey is mandatory, and you should submit one response per Healthwatch. It should take around 30 minutes to complete. We recommend you look through the questions below and collect any required information before you begin the survey.

Take the Annual Survey

Download the Annual Survey questions (PDF)

Use our Case for support guidance to help you have discussions with ICS about Healthwatch resourcing, including effective collaboration and acknowledging the additional burden of delivering functions within the ICS.

The guidance helps show the value of Healthwatch to an integrated care system. In particular, how the work of Healthwatch can help ICSs achieve its aims and meet needs.

This tool should be used alongside conversations with ICS stakeholders and not sent without prior discussion with them.

How to use the template

As this is a PowerPoint template, you can easily make changes to include local details and context, as well as any specifics relevant to the partnership under discussion. You could also personalise the template using:

• Quotes of support and testimonials from local people
• Facts and statistics relevant to the ICS
• Details of all the Healthwatch requiring support and the work you do
• Specific projects for which support is needed and costs
• Local photography

Whilst this PowerPoint template gives you the tools to provide an overview either in person or digitally, we recommend following up with a more detailed proposal. This should set out the specifics of the relationship, and should focus on how the ICS can meet their priorities, rather than Healthwatch's needs.

We hope the new Case for Support will prove to be a valuable tool in discussions with the ICS in your area, acting as an introduction to how a partnership could develop and a starting point for discussions.

This guidance for Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) provides a structure which local Healthwatch and the Integrated Care System (ICS) can use and adapt to reach an agreement on how they will work together.

This Guidance is designed to use existing and emerging guidance and legislation, whilst also taking into consideration the differences that exist across systems.

Before you start drafting an Memorandum of Understanding with your ICS, you should work with other local Healthwatch to develop a collaboration agreement. This will help you determine a shared understanding of how you want to work together with other local Healthwatch first. To do this, check out our Collaboration Toolkit, which gives you a step by step guide on how you can build a solid working relationship with other Healthwatch.

Inequality in Islington

Decision-makers regularly approach local minority-led organisations about the experiences of their residents. However, those organisations are often too busy getting on with supporting their clients' immediate needs to respond. This means their work to reduce health inequalities impacts their ability to participate in discussions about inequalities.

Islington is a diverse borough with huge and widening socioeconomic and health inequalities. But historically, the views of these people have been overlooked, or they haven't known they could share their experiences. Similarly, the groups supporting them could not advocate more widely than on an individual basis. 

To help tackle these issues, we set out to put people impacted by inequality at the heart of decision-making. 

Why work with partners to engage more widely? 

Like all Healthwatch, we're a small organisation with a big task. Islington has a diverse and transient population. Most residents were not born in the local area, 30% of residents are from ethnic minority backgrounds, and 20% are from white other backgrounds. There are many languages spoken, and wealth and health inequality are high. In particular, refugee and migrant communities and disabled residents are more likely to be experiencing poverty (including in-work poverty) and poor health. 

We know that residents open up to professionals with whom they have a long-standing relationship and who they trust. For example, Voluntary Sector partners providing benefits advice work with people we know we need to reach. 

What we have achieved

Influencing services together

• Together, we've reported residents' views on various issues, including mental health, social prescribing, and the pandemic's impact. We've also influenced how our local partner's commission engagement, focusing on giving residents information to help them access support and asking for their views.
• Partners in the voluntary and community sector now commission us to evaluate their work, increasing our knowledge of what people in the borough need. A local Trust funder also recommends us for independent evaluations.
• The partnership flourished through the pandemic. We helped each other reach people and access information. We also worked with new partners, including Disability Action Islington, University College London and City and Islington College. 

Real change

• We secured £64,000 of statutory funding for mental health support for communities from ethnic minority backgrounds, delivered through trusted local partners who can support residents to recognise the need for help.
• Raised awareness of inconsistencies around interpreting (for non-English speakers and British Sign Language users), though this work is ongoing. At one point, our CCG agreed to ensure all service specifications explicitly stated a need for interpreting, but this will need re-asserting within the ICS.
• GPs encouraged (by commissioners) not to rely on mental health self-referral for specific under-represented communities.
• Statutory Equality Impact Assessment will no longer be done by one person.
• Helped to keep residents updated on COVID-19 guidance and inform the borough's COVID-19 vaccine roll-out by sharing findings on what Islington's diverse communities are telling our partners and us.

Main issues people face

We have spoken to a broad group of residents who experience life in the borough very differently from each other. Although the issues have been numerous and diverse, some themes come through.

• Lack of awareness of what services are available and what they are entitled to use. 
• There is a wide variation in understanding of public health messaging, such as COVID-19 or healthy lifestyle messaging. 
• It is difficult to access information about some services because of how it's communicated and the channels and language used.
• Socioeconomic factors, including in-work poverty, caring responsibilities, and poor housing, impact people's health and their ability to self-care.
• Lack of understanding within some services of the needs of different communities and a perceived impatience for those who don't speak English well.

Working in Partnership - Step by step guide 

Below is a step by step guide to the process we used to set up the partnership. 

Criteria for selecting your partners

• Reach: Can the partner(s) reach people you don't, and can they demonstrate that they'll be able to reach people within the timeframes of your project.
• Due diligence: We work with small organisations, but we expect them to share our values. All partners need to have several key policies in place: Safeguarding, Health and Safety and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. We can share policy templates if partners need advice.
• Turnover: Although we partner with organisations of all sizes when fundraising to deliver work, we prioritise smaller partners. Although we're approached by others wanting to join the partnership, we can't say yes to everyone. If partners with a higher turnover wish to work with us, we can do that, but we might request that they lead the bid-writing process.

Delivering together

• What resources you will need: Our Healthwatch budget is £156,000 a year, and this is taken up with staffing costs and overheads like having an office, volunteer expenses and the cost of events. If, like us, your core Healthwatch budget doesn't allow for contracting small organisations, think about which funders you can appeal to. For example, statutory bodies, public health, CCGs, NHS Trusts and GP federations. You can also apply to Trust funders. As these will be different for each area, you could ask your local infrastructure organisation for advice. You will also need to agree on how resources and risk will be fairly shared from the start. We pay partners in advance but hold back between 10 and 15% as a contingency in case any of the partners cannot fulfil their part.
• Decide who will do what: All the usual tasks are involved: project management, development of research questions and recording tools, briefing partners and responding to queries, undertaking surveys, analysing and reporting the findings, and presenting the results to commissioners. Agree from the start on who will do what.
• Collate and share findings: We use Excel as it's accessible to most organisations, easy to analyse, and can be added to existing databases such as the Healthwatch CRM. We try to agree on recommendations and next steps across the partnership and with relevant commissioners and providers.
• Promote your findings: Agree where will you take your findings and who (from the partnership) will take them. We have tended to lead this as we are often 'at the table'. But, we've also created co-chairing opportunities to take our evidence to decision-makers at events we don't attend. 
• Showcasing: We discovered that partners talk about how good it is to work with us without even asking, so we're starting to formalise how we can all advocate for our research and the partnership. We've incorporated partner feedback into our Theory of Change. Partners say that working with us has increased their knowledge of what their clients are entitled to and enables them to access services more easily.

Challenges to collecting people's views

We've tended to find smaller, grass-roots organisations have the best reach and deliver more quickly. We've also worked with national organisations less successfully, as this needs more lead-in time.

Costs and resources needed

Small organisations are often extremely busy supporting residents with complex needs. Taking them away from this work to participate in health and care workshops and engagement needs resourcing. We've sought funding from a range of statutory providers, from housing associations, local Trust funders Cloudesley and Cripplegate and national funders; Charities Aid Foundation, the National Lottery (Awards for All) and Independent Age. We tend to be more successful with local funding bodies as we've built a strong reputation in the area.

Costs vary from project to project, depending on outputs, outcomes and deadlines.

Tips for success

• Work with people you know get results: Who are the people in your community working with residents experiencing health inequality? You'll know who they are; pick them as your partners.
• Share the risk: We originally planned to pay partners upon activity completion, but small organisations have small cash flow, so we usually pay in advance.  
•  Promote your partnership on your website: We spent a long time reeling off a long list of partners each time providers and commissioners asked us who was in the partnership. The partnership now has its own web page.
• Think about the name: We didn't know whether Diverse Communities Health Voice would be successful, so we didn't spend enough time agreeing on a name. We picked a long name, and no one remembers what the acronym stands for. 

Privacy Statement

Why do you need a privacy statement?

UK data protection legislation requires you to publish a privacy notice on your website setting out what data you collect, for what purposes and how you use and store it.

It should contain the following information:

• All relevant contact information, such as the name and contact details of your organisation (and your representative if applicable) and your data protection officer’s contact details;
• The purpose of the data you process and the lawful bases for doing so;
• The types of personal data you obtain and the data source, if the personal data is not obtained from the individual it relates to;
• All personal data that you share with other organisations and, if applicable, details of data transfers to any third countries or international organisations;
• The retention periods for the personal data you hold, or if that is not possible, the criteria used to determine the retention period; and
• Details about individuals' rights including, if applicable, the right to withdraw consent and the right to make a complaint.

We have created an editable template for you to create your own privacy statement.

Cookies policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files which are transferred to your computer or mobile when you visit a website or app. These small text files store small pieces of information, usually tracking the users behaviour on the website.

What is a cookie policy?

A cookie policy is information to your website users about what cookie are active on your website, what data they are tracking, why they are tracking this data and what will happen to this data.

Your policy should also include information on how users can opt out of the cookies or change the settings to control what data is tracked.

Why do I need a cookies policy?

A cookies policy is a legal requirement to have on your website. It can be displayed as part of your privacy statement or as a standalone policy on you website, but it must be present and easy for users to find and understand.

Cookies are a potential privacy risk, because they track and store users behaviour on your website, therefore it is important this policy is regularly updated.

Having a page showing your impact can help everyone understand how your Healthwatch improves the lives of people living in your community. By adding new stories about what you have achieved, you can show the difference you have made. 

Here are three examples of Healthwatch who have built their impact page using our guidance: 

• Healthwatch Bristol
• Healthwatch Lambeth
• Healthwatch Sunderland

When creating your impact page from this guidance, it is essential that you:

• Keep each story short and to the point so readers can understand the difference you made. 
• Only add new stories when positive changes have been achieved. 
• Go back and update the stories if new outcomes happen so the content stays up to date.