VOICES from across Dumfries and Galloway are needed to establish a strategy aimed at ensuring everyone is encouraged and supported to shape approaches to health and social care.
A 14-week period of public consultation is now underway around Dumfries and Galloway Integration Joint Board’s (IJB) Draft Participation and Engagement Strategy for 2022/25.
Integration Joint Board Chair Laura Douglas said: “It is vital that the approaches which are taken around health and social care within Dumfries and Galloway are informed and shaped by the people within our region.
“The IJB has a responsibility for health and social care planning within the region, and a responsibility for overseeing how health and social care is provided.
“However, the way that health and social care is delivered must be shaped by everyone in Dumfries and Galloway – including the people delivering those services, the people who access them, their Carers, and their families.
“The IJB wants to make sure that everyone has the chance to be involved in developing these approaches, and that they are encouraged and supported to do so.”
To this end, a Draft Participation and Engagement Strategy for 2022/25 has been developed which aims to set out how approaches to participation and engagement are undertaken and improved over the next three years.
In its draft form, and informed by national and local guidance and engagement, the strategy has five goals:
- Include engagement in all the work that we do to develop and deliver care and support.
- People who deliver health and social care and support will feel able to engage with the people they support in an open and honest manner. They will ensure that the public has a say in all service planning, improvements and developments.
- Listen to the widest possible range of people, so that everything that we do is influenced by their views.
- Keep people well informed and help them when they want to give their views, so that they contribute to planning health and social care and support.
- All engagement and consultation activities must be high-quality and reach a wide range of people.
Ms Douglas said: “We’d strongly encourage everyone to review the current draft version of the strategy, and to get involved in helping to shape it into a document which will be central to our approaches over the next three years.”
Consultation on the draft strategy is being undertaken on behalf of the IJB by Dumfries and Galloway Health and Social Care Partnership, and will conclude on 5 June 2022.
Anyone in the region will now be able to download the draft strategy and give their views through an online survey. A downloadable version of the survey for those who would prefer to print it out and reply.
An easy read version of the strategy and a British Sign Language version are now also available.
Printed copies of the survey and the strategy can be requested from the DGHSCP communications team at the address below.
Online events over the next two months will allow members of the public and other interested groups to make their views known:
Seldom-heard groups: 26 April at 2 pm
Community council members: 27 April at 2.30 pm
Public events: 4 May at 5.30 pm and 11 May at 5.30 pm
Staff at NHS Dumfries and Galloway, Dumfries and Galloway Council, and elsewhere in the Health and Social Care Partnership: 5 May at 2 pm and 12 May at 2 pm
Anyone interested in attending any of these events should email dg.engagement@nhs.scot. Completed surveys, and any other comments on the draft strategy, can also be sent to dg.engagement@nhs.scot, or posted to: Communications Team, DGHSCP, Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary, Cargenbridge, Dumfries DG2 8RX.