Access your options
Before you start a piece of work, you’ll need to do a bit of research to present your proposal to your board.
Resources to help:
Goal: You should now have a project proposal with enough information for your board to decide.
Make your decision
Once you have your proposal, your board should follow their decision-making policy and either approve, refuse or ask for more information.
Resources to help:
Goal: You should now have a clear decision from your board. This should be recorded in the minutes of your board meeting and available on your website.
Stage one: Scoping
Stage two: Planning
Plan your activity
When planning a project, it’s important that you make clear at the start what outcomes you want to achieve and identify the steps you need to get through research and communications.
Resources to help:
- Making a Difference
- Theory of Change
- Research project planner
- Avoiding bias
- Getting research sample right
- Quality assurance
- Working with partners and maintaining independence
- Planning your communications
- Developing a communications strategy
Goal: You should now have a project plan covering research, communications and planned outcomes.
Understand your data protection responsibilities
Any project where you are gathering views from the public you will need to complete a data processing impact assessment.
Resources to help:
Goal: You should now have a completed data processing impact assessment.
Complete an Equality Impact Assessment
Conducting an Equality Impact Assessment for your projects is important to help you show impact. It’s designed to help you show that your outcomes and recommendations lead to increased quality and reduced barriers for those who experience discrimination or disadvantage.
Resources to help:
- Equality Impact Assessment template
- How to engage seldom heard groups in Healthwatch research
- Guidance on recording demographic data
Goal: You should now have a completed equality impact assessment.
Understand the risks
An important part of project planning is to assess the risks for everyone involved.
Resources to help:
Goal: you should now have a project risk assessment stating how you plan to manage and mitigate any identified risks.
Delivering your project
We want your work to have as much impact as possible. To help you do this, we have a range of support on engagement techniques, analysing your data and writing reports and, influencing through communications.
Resources to help:
- Different ways of engaging with people
- Quality assurance guidance
- How to tell a strong story
- Writing recommendations
- Writing reports
Goal: You should now have an end of project report in an appropriate format.
Highlight your impact
It’s important that you share back the difference you make both with partners and your community. This helps highlight the value of both Healthwatch and why people should share their experience with you.
Resources to help:
Goal: To be able to demonstrate why people share their views with Healthwatch and the difference it makes and to create a case study that highlights the value you bring.
Stage three: Delivery
Stage four: Evaluation
Evaluate your success
Evaluation is an important part of any project. Take time to look at what worked well and what could be improved next time.
You should consider:
- What difference did you make to your communities?
Did providers act on your recommendations? What can you take forward for your next project in how you planned, influenced or worked with others? - Lessons learned
How did your team conduct the project. If you did it again, what would you do differently? Will your insights change the way you approach your next project?