Updated Framework

We have refreshed the domains of the Quality Framework and added in more detail covering equality, diversity and inclusion along with more information on working with Integrated Care Systems. 

The new Framework is available to complete via Smart Survey, to make it quicker and easier for you to complete.  

How it can help?

• Understand where your work is currently effective and where you can make improvements
• Informs local authorities on how to commission and monitor an effective Healthwatch
• Enables Healthwatch England to identify where further help is needed by individual Healthwatch and how we can improve the support and training we provide.

Quality Framework domains

1. Leadership and Decision Making: This looks at the importance of having clear goals and a rationale for your work. It also looks at the strength of your leadership and governance, both of which are key to successfully navigating a complex environment whilst maintaining independence and accountability.
2. People:  This recognises the importance of staff and volunteers. It can help you understand whether your board, staff and volunteers have the right knowledge, skills and support to deliver an effective, consistent service.
3. Sustainability and Resilience: This focuses on a business model that enables you to plan and operate effectively, as well as adapting to the changing needs of communities.
4. Collaboration: This recognises the value of working in partnership, and of learning from other Healthwatch.
5. Engagement, Involvement and Reach: This focuses on our main statutory activities. It looks at how you go about reaching out to all sections of your community, gathering people’s views, providing advice and information, and involving people in your work.
6. Influence and Impact: This focuses on our purpose by looking at the difference you make by ensuring those in charge of health and care services hear and act on people's views. 

Using the Quality Framework

Why not sign up to use the Quality Framework? If you get involved, we will offer you 1-2-1 support and talk through any guidance or training needs you have as a result of completing the Framework.

If you have already started working through the previous Excel spreadsheet, we will continue to offer you support to complete the Framework this way, however we recommend people starting out use the simplified Smart Survey version. 

Please get in touch with Delana Lawson if you are interested in learning more.

The five-year forward plan will be reviewed and revised annually and reflect joint strategic needs assessments and local health and wellbeing strategies. 

We have produced a series of briefings on some of the issues we’ve heard about most.

Integrated care strategies provide an excellent opportunity to fulfill one of Healthwatch’s core functions to make “reports and recommendations about how local care services could or ought to be improved.”

What has changed?

Although the creation of integrated care systems (ICSs) through the Health and Care Act has often been presented as a significant change, in reality – for many local Healthwatch – the main difference will be the scale at which they need to consider the plans.

Healthwatch has considerable experience in influencing the development of plans at the local authority and clinical commissioning group levels so that you will use the same techniques but in a more complex landscape.

How to use these briefings?

We have selected some of the issues that you may want to raise for inclusion in your integrated care strategy, identifying some of the tools that you may be able to use:

• Accessible Information Standard
• Elective care
• Maternity and maternal mental health
• Mental Health
• Primary Care 

It will be easier to influence if there is common ground between what the ICP is looking at and what you are trying to achieve. If the system already recognises that an issue needs to be a priority, you can present your case to help the ICP to decide how best to tackle the problem rather than as an additional burden.

The approach we have taken is to consider what may be necessary for the ICP to consider, including at the national, regional and local levels. If you can use the same evidence to back up your case, you can maximise that common ground and be seen as supporting the ICP in achieving its goal.

The NHS Long Term Plan is still an important document, even if we don’t hear about it as much as we did. NHS England will be producing a refreshed version of the plan later in the year, but in the meantime, it is still worth bearing in mind the expectations in the current plan. 

The briefings are a good starting place, with ICPs looking at national priorities and targets – and considering the implications for their area. 

National and local performance data will help you decide whether your area is doing better or worse (or just average) and whether you can use that as a lever to get an issue on the agenda.

We’ve also looked at progress, generally at a national level. The ICP will likely look at progress locally to see how it compares with the national picture.

There is a risk that integrated care strategies focus too much on numbers. So we’d recommend using your insight into people’s experiences to enable the ICP to consider the full potential of what it is proposing. Other partners may also have helpful insight, particularly about marginalised communities, so consider getting the broadest range possible. 

About this course

This course will give you an understanding of using Smart Survey analysis tools:

• An overview of Smart Survey
• Understanding its functions to analyse your data
• Interpreting the data you collect

It will take you about an hour to an hour and a half to complete this course if you decide to do it in one go, which we do recommend for the best learner experience. However, you can pause and return to it later if you need to. 

You will be able to download a certificate once you have successfully completed the course.

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for staff with some existing analysis skills who want to use Smart Survey to collect and interpret survey data. 

What will you learn?

This course will help you to understand: 

• How you can use Smart Survey in your research  
• How you can use the various functions and analysis tools in Smart Survey to help you in your work 
• How you can analyse both text and numerical data in Smart  Survey 
• How you can produce reports that display results from a sub-group of your survey respondents  
• How you can create and customise charts to visually represent your data   
• How are tools in Smart Survey different from the traditional methods of analysing data, such as in Microsoft Excel 

What is the Theory of Change?

There are many tools for understanding how organisations make a difference. One widely used by the non-profit sector is called ‘Theory of Change’. 

Your Theory of Change for an individual project or area of work describes a sequence of events or outcomes that you expect to lead to your desired long-term outcomes.

Producing a Theory of Change before starting a new piece of work can help you consider how likely you are to achieve positive changes. It can help you identify anything you might do differently to maximise the likelihood of success and make the best use of your resources. 

Usually, a Theory of Change is produced at a very early stage of planning a piece of work; before the more detailed project plan. 

We regularly provide workshops about using a Theory of Change approach. We can consider providing an online session for your team. Contact jon.turner@healthwatch.co.uk for more information. 

Template to create your own 

Based on a model provided by Healthwatch Islington, we’ve developed a template that you can use to produce your own Theory of Change in an easy format. 

It’s best used after you have attended a workshop. However, the template now includes instructions to remind you about each of the stages. It can help you to understand the process even if you haven't yet been to a workshop. 

The template uses Microsoft Excel. To view and use it properly, you will need to open it using a desktop version of Excel rather than an online or Office 365 version. 

After you’ve opened the document, go first to the tab that says ‘Overall Summary – read first.’ 

What is a taxonomy?

The taxonomy are the fields of data you collect in your feedback from the public. They consist of two main types:

• The key fields we want you to share with us
• Other optional fields, including a wider selection of demographics

Why is this taxonomy important? 

This new taxonomy has been built based on you feedback as we want it to meet your needs as well as ours. 

Ensuring that your taxonomy meets ours is essential for you to be able to meet the legal requirement to share your data with us. 

Find out whether you need to make any changes to your existing taxonomy with our simple guide that clearly sets out the fields you need to be collecting. 

About this guidance

Getting started with SmartSurvey

This guidance is for new users of SmartSurvey – an online survey, questionnaire and feedback tool that we provide for Healthwatch. In this guide we cover:

• Creating surveys
• Adding and editing questions and answers
• Controlling responses using skip logic
• Formatting your survey
• Distributing your survey
• Viewing and analysing responses
• Sharing surveys with other users

Sign-up to SmartSurvey

To request one or more SmartSurvey accounts, please complete this online form.

You can also take a look at Smart Survey's own guidance and resources.

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.