NHS England awards 11 community grants

27 Oct 2015 03:22 PM

NHS England has yesterday awarded 11 community grants, totalling £10,000, to organisations that are leading the way in involving patients and the public in healthcare projects.

The Celebrating Participation in Healthcare grants are for community groups that have developed innovative and creative ways to get patients and the public involved in shaping healthcare services.

The grant funding will enable these groups to showcase the excellent work they are doing and encourage other organisations to learn from their projects.

The successful groups will use their funding to develop a range of promotional resources to highlight the work they have done, such as short films and books. The groups will share their experiences of working with a variety of people, including young people and homeless people, to improve health services for the groups who use them.

The new resources that are developed will be shared through NHS England’s website and local and national networks. They will help health and voluntary sector organisations from across England to learn from this successful engagement work and put their own projects in place.

Grant awards are being made to the following organisations:

• Mind in Brighton and Hove’s LiVE Project: Supporting people with lived experience of mental health issues to develop diverse and varied approaches to engagement to help shape local services.
• The Neuromuscular Centre (NMC): Using creative patient and public engagement in social auditing and accounting approaches to drive service improvements
• Young Epilepsy: Engaging young people to share their experiences of living with epilepsy, and their opinions about the services that impact on them.
• My Life My Choice: Demonstrating how people with learning disabilities have become engaged with improving healthcare services in Oxfordshire
• St George’s Crypt: Highlighting how engaging with homeless communities and benefitting from the expertise of strategic partners can bring about person-led well evidenced service improvements
• South Yorkshire Housing Association: A user-led quality assurance network which empowers patients to improve the quality of health and social care services. It’s designed, delivered, evaluated and governed by people with lived experience of these services
• Healthwatch Newcastle: Demonstrating how engagement work with children and young people influenced and improved dental services
• Healthy Me Healthy Communities, Manchester: Using creative “community conversations” to develop local health and well-being action plans
• Royal Mencap Society: Showcasing the approaches to consultation work that the Hull Self advocacy group used to influence improvements with the City Health Partnership
• York Mind, York: Hearing the voice of people with learning disabilities through creative engagement
• Healthwatch Brighton & Hove & the Jaffa Panel (Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals Trust):
  Patients and the public helping shape and design NHS health research

For further information contact: england.nhs.participation@nhs.net or see theCommunity Grants webpage.