Jess attends the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare
On Thursday 11th April, I joined colleagues from the Hampshire and Isle Wight ICB and University Hospital Southampton at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare – a very big and scary conference in London! Why you ask? Well earlier this year the Raising Voices in Research project partners submitted a summary about the project, which got accepted and we were invited to present a poster at the event. Our poster detailed how we delivered the project, the key themes VCSE organisations and their communities shared as part of the Local Plan for Research, and a link to the evaluation.
The poster was one of over 250 on display for the whole three-day conference which also had a range of breakout sessions on different themes. I attended one keynote and three talks all based around the theme of community partnerships that make an impact. Being a large, international conference, I was worried that these talks would be about communities rather than with communities, including those with lived experience. However, I was pleasantly surprised as all the sessions I went to had at least one person with lived experience or a community organisation leading; all doing really innovative and important work in their localities to ensure improvements are made to healthcare so they can effectively tackle health inequalities.
Highlights from the day included…
- A powerful keynote on Community and Equity, where Kamran Abbasi (editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal) stated “without focussing on community and equity we will not achieve health and wellbeing”.
- Learning about how Lived Experience Leads are recruited as equal members of staff at the Health Innovation Network South London, to address power imbalances in public engagement.
- Being taught about the Inequity Waste Matrix – which highlights waste categories that result in inequality (see below). Interestingly, the purple shapes reflect some of the insights shared by communities in Raising Voices in Research. Reviewing the matrix, I feel all the categories need to be acknowledged and addressed we’re going to tackle inequalities and improve healthcare, so it meets the needs of all communities. However, at the moment this is not always the case, as some categories, particularly those in blue, aren’t always spoken about.
Writing this on the train home has helped me to reflect on the tonnes of information I’ve heard at the conference. But I’m also asking myself, what next? How do we move from learning into action? For me, I think Action Hampshire can continue to work closely with local healthcare providers to advocate for (active) listening to the voices of the VCSE sector and their community members, and embedding learning into our various engagement methods.
Follow this link for more information on our Raising Voices in Research project
