Health in Your Hands: What Matters to You?

The NHS Borders Health in Your Hands: What Matters to You? public engagement exercise was launched at the NHS Borders Annual Review in September 2015 and concluded in March 2016.

The main purpose of the exercise was to give the public and staff an opportunity to tell us what was important to them to help NHS Borders shape future services and give consideration to future priorities. The exercise was also aimed at providing the chance for the Board to listen and to give an opportunity for people to give feedback and share their stories on the care that they have received in the past or recommendations for how they would like to receive care in the future should they require it.

The Board wanted to provide a more broad and flexible approach to allow people to engage more easily and enable meaningful conversations with the public and staff. With this in mind, 3 different tiers of engagement took place:

• Informal Approach: engaging with people at cafés, supermarkets, health centres, community hospitals, 'pop-up' stalls in the dining room at the BGH, from our patient feedback volunteers
• Formal Approach: engaging with formal groups which already meet
• Targeted Audience: engagement with seldom-heard and hard-to-reach groups

The full report on the outputs and feedback from the engagement exercise was presented to Borders NHS Board in June 2016. This provided a flavour of the comments received under the different methods of engagement, the key findings from these comments, and the key themes of the conversation.

We are very grateful for the time and effort people have contributed to this conversation. NHS Borders is an important part of life for people from all communities across the Scottish Borders. Everyone will come into contact with our services at some point in their lives whether it be through accessing services for themselves, for others or through their working lives as an NHS employee or as an employee of one of our partners in service delivery. With this position comes the responsibility to ensure that NHS Borders provide services that match the needs of our local population and in a way that is accessible to all.

The Health in Your Hands: What Matters to You? 'flash' report provides a summary of the key themes from the engagement exercise.

To view the full report which was presented to Borders NHS Board in June please click on this link.