Our five year plan, also called the Joint Forward Plan, describes how the NHS across South West London will work together over the next five years to meet the needs of local people.
The ambitions outlined in the plan were developed from our understanding of the health needs of people in South West London, the health inequalities that exist and importantly the views, experiences and concerns of our people and communities.
How we developed the plan
Insight report
In January 2023, we reviewed 180 reports from our partner organisations in South West London. This included reports from:
- the six borough Healthwatches
- voluntary and community sector organisations
- our NHS trusts
- the six local authorities
- our borough engagement teams
This gave us insight into the views and experiences of thousands of residents, from a cross-section of our local community.
We used this to produce an insight report which helped us to understand what local people feel about a broad range of health and care services and issues.
Read our insight report:
Engagement activity
In March 2023 we published the first phase of our plan. This explained:
- the background and context for our plans
- what local people and communities told us is important
- our ambitions
We carried out a range of engagement activity in April and May 2023 to take views on the first phase of our plan.
The feedback we have received from local people, community groups, our staff, and partner organisations has directly influenced the ambitions set out in our Joint Forward Plan.
You can read more about this in our engagement report:
Online survey
Almost 600 people across our community told us their views using our online survey. The survey was promoted on our website, shared on social media, distributed to health and care staff, and shared through voluntary and community networks.
More about our online survey:
Focus groups, community events and one to one discussions
We carried out targeted engagement with groups identified through our gap analysis.
With help from local community and voluntary organisations, we ran 12 focus groups during April and May 2023. This helped us hear from diverse voices in every South West London borough, including:
- patients
- refugees and asylum seekers
- parents and carers
- elderly residents
- people from the LGBTQIA+ community
- secondary school children
- people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds
- mental health patients and their families
Find out more about the focus group events:
We also went to talk with people attending existing community events and forums. We had one-to-one conversations with people who needed additional support and developed an easy read version of our plans, to make them as easy as possible for everyone to understand.
Partner feedback
We also asked our health and care partner organisations to respond to the first version of our plan. We received responses from:
- our six borough Healthwatches
- our six local authorities
- St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Councillor Ruth Dombey, leader of Sutton Council
- RM Partners cancer alliance
- St George’s, Epsom and St Helier Hospital Group (GESH)
Read the feedback from our partners on page 21 of our April 2023 board papers
We’re grateful to our partners, particularly our local Healthwatches and voluntary sector leaders, for sharing their insight and engagement work and for supporting us to reach local people and deliver engagement activity across the South West London community.
Equality, and inclusion
To make sure our plans took account of equality and inclusion, we took views from across a diverse range of local people and communities.
We also carried out a gap analysis to show us where we may need to get more information. This helped us to plan our public engagement activity and understand which groups of people, areas, and care settings we should focus our discussions around.
The priorities we identified included:
- urgent and emergency care
- primary care – with a focus on prevention
- long term conditions
- children and young people
- mental health – specifically hearing from autistic people and people with a learning disability
- people who identify as LGBTQIA+