North Staffordshire Clinical Commissioning Group

North Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent commissioned Engaging Communities to understand the public’s views about the future provision of primary care services.

From the outset, it was clear that the Engaging Communities team had a comprehensive understanding of the issues faced and particularly the challenges that primary care would need to address. This information was used to develop a wide-ranging engagement strategy for patients and other stakeholders.

Rather than creating a new approach the team built on the knowledge they had from previous engagement strategies and this together with a widespread awareness of the localities resulted in an approach which produced an in-depth understanding of the issues that patients and the public faced and provided a very solid base for the CCGs to build on both in developing the primary care strategy and in terms of a future engagement strategy.

I was particularly impressed with the way in which Engaging Communities were able to harness their community experience to ensure that the views of seldom heard groups were strongly represented throughout.”

Liza Pursey: Interim Primary Care Strategy Manager North Staffordshire Clinical Commissioning Group