Event details
Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing emphasis within health and care on ensuring that the voices of people who draw on care and support are heard.
There was a huge amount of work at national and local levels from the early to mid-2000s on patient and public engagement to ensure that people’s voices and experiences were more central to how the NHS was run.
However, there is evidence that this trend is not continuing, as the number of people feeling involved in decisions about their care or treatment has been falling since 2020 and staff increasingly report feeling powerless to act on what they are hearing.
Lack of staff, underfunding, pressures on the system, and bureaucracy all have a significant impact on the system’s ability to effectively listen to people and communities. Yet working with the communities and people the NHS serves could actually solve a lot of the problems that the system faces in the first place.
Event topics
Join this King's Fund conference to learn how health and care leaders can turn listening into action and enact meaningful change. Engage with a diverse range of speakers and sessions through hearing case studies, panel discussions and learning from experts by experience. The conference will explore:
- the current state of play in terms of listening to people and communities and community engagement, and what change still needs to happen
- lessons learnt from activists and communities who have engaged with systems to enact change
- how leaders are overcoming barriers in the system to listen effectively and engage with communities
- utilising data to drive effective change for individuals and communities
- why listening to people who access care and support is one of the best ways to deliver real change and improvements to care services
- effective collaboration strategies between health care systems and communities
- how working and thinking differently through partnering with communities can help to reduce health inequalities.