Healthwatch Knowlsey, Knowsley Older People’s Involvement Programme and Partnership Public Engagement Facilitation and Support Service

Local Healthwatch (LHW) is at the heart of a health and care service that is centred on patients and users. Local Healthwatch will gather people’s views on, and experiences of, the health and social care system. In this way, community views will have real influence with those who commission and on those who provide services, about what users, carers and citizens need and want from them. This can help them to be more responsive to what matters to service users and the public and enable them to design services around their needs.

Knowsley older people’s involvement programme will be responsible for promoting and enabling the engagement and the active involvement of older people (aged 55 years and over) in Knowsley with local agency partners and stakeholders to carry out the following activities:

• promote and support the meaningful involvement of older people in the commissioning, provision and scrutiny of local services;
• empower older people to participate in the review, commissioning and monitoring of local services;
• obtain the views of older people about their needs for, and their experiences of, local services;
• making their views known to those responsible for commissioning, providing, managing and scrutinising those services; and
• the maintenance and support of the Knowsley Older Peoples Voice (KOPV).

The partnership public engagement facilitation and support service is required to coordinate the Knowsley engagement forum and facilitate effective public engagement and involvement activities to support the Knowsley strategic board and health and wellbeing board. This includes specifically facilitating the overall delivery and functionality of the physical disability and sensory impairment partnership board, learning disability partnership board, carers’ partnership board, older peoples’ partnership board and the autism service development group.

• to coordinate the engagement forum;
• facilitate effective public engagement and involvement activities to support the Knowsley Strategic Board and Health and Wellbeing Board (and Safeguarding Boards as necessary) to deliver their respective priorities over the period of the contract;
• to ensure that each specialist partnership boards/groups is administered in a manner that is conducive to the overall objectives of the board and that the boards are representative of the people they serve.