Winter Plan Toolkit 2023-2024
About
Health and care services always face the highest demand in winter. In this toolkit, you'll find resources to help you market your services, gather people's health and care experiences and give useful advice and information to the public.
What's in the toolkit?
- An overview of our approach
- Advice and information resources
- Communication resources to help you market your service
- Links to wider winter campaigns you can support
- Advice on sharing insight and holding services to account
- How to share what you are doing locally
We'll add new resources as and when they are ready.
An overview
NHS and social care services already face high demand. This winter, pressure on care could be even more significant, and compounded by:
- The existing backlog of care, with waiting lists for elective care at record levels
- New waves of COVID-19, flu and other winter illnesses
- The cost of living crisis, with more people physically and mentally affected by cold weather because they've had to cut back on food and heating
- Ongoing industrial action by health professionals
Our focus
You can help support health and care services by:
- Using the experiences that people share with you to help services spot and address issues
- Providing advice that helps people stay well and use services effectively
- Supporting the broader community response to protect your communities' health if you can
Advice and information
We have reviewed our advice and information content and collated them for you to use on your website and communications channels.
We'll update our winter advice collection as new content becomes available.
Marketing your service
We have developed a marketing campaign you can use to promote your service this winter.
This social media campaign we are planning to start on Monday 4th December 2023. You can launch your own campaigns on the same day, or after, but please don't launch before this date.
The campaign toolkit has links to Canva assets you can download or edit with your own logo. For any Healthwatch not using Canva you can download these images from Brandstencil.
Supporting wider NHS campaigns
As part of this year's campaign, we want to help NHS and social care services support people over the winter months. They have a number of campaigns that we'll be supporting at a national level. We encourage you to incorporate these into your winter marketing. The assets are available through the links below.
Sharing your insight and holding services to account
As well as quickly relaying positive and negative insight to local decision-makers, please also share your data with us to help keep national policymakers abreast of emerging issues.
You can also use the experiences that people have shared with you to scrutinise the delivery of ICS winter plans.
Questions to help you hold your system to account
Let us know what you're doing locally
Last winter, many of you ran or supported wider community initiatives.
These included producing a winter guide for local people on how to stay well, partnering with other groups to run a wellbeing fair, providing winter warm hubs and helping the NHS shape their winter messaging.
We want to help promote your work this winter, so please tell us when you're involved in similar initiatives.
Professional audiences:
We know many of you have great working relationships within your local health and social care landscape. Good communication about important issues helps maintain those relationships and build new ones. If you want assets to support you in connecting with your professional partners and key stakeholders, let us know!