Winter Plan Toolkit 2024-2025
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 high levels
- New waves of COVID-19, flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other winter illnesses
- Cost of living pressures, with some people physically and mentally affected by cold weather because they've had to cut back on food and heating
- Ongoing collective action by some 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, and
- Providing advice that helps people stay well and use services effectively
Advice and information
We have reviewed our advice and information content and collated them for you to use on your website and communications channels.
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 November 2024. 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.
Cold weather communications toolkit
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.
Log in to our data sharing platform
You can also use the experiences that people have shared with you to scrutinise the delivery of ICS winter plans.