The ALLIANCE’s Integration, Engagement and Lived Experience Hub review 2022

Starting this year, the new ALLIANCE hub established connections and partnerships across Scotland to give a voice to lived experience.

The ALLIANCE’s Integration, Engagement and Lived Experience Hub was established in 2022. The hub brings together our vast range of work on Integration and Lived Experience activity, as well as the support we provide to the ALLIANCE’s wider engagement.

This year, we have continued to develop our Community of Practice. This community brings together a diverse network of people and organisations to share learning, good practice and ideas with regards to engaging with the voice of lived experience. Our meetings so far have provided an opportunity to set out the purpose, goals and outcomes of the group and discuss network members’ wants, needs and offers. They have also featured presentations from members who have shared learning and discussed their experience of involving the voice of lived experience in their own work.

We have also created a new IJB Representative Network, which brings together service user and patient representatives from IJBs across Scotland. IJB representatives were given the opportunity to shape this network from its inception. At our first meeting we discussed what was important to representatives, key areas of focus and what support our hub can provide. Each subsequent meeting has been informed by network members’ suggestions. For the next meeting of this network in February 2023, we will be joined by the Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care. This will give IJB representatives the opportunity to hear more about plans for Scotland’s National Care Service.

Our partnership work in the Scottish Borders has also continued. We held another Third Sector Forum in April which featured updates from the local Third Sector Interface (TSI), Borders Care Voice and the new Chief Officer Chris Myers. We discussed the progress that has been made with regards to our agreed actions so far. A second Third Sector Representative has been secured on the Integration Joint Board (IJB), we discussed options for future networking meetings and we are still considering the production of some form of co-production charter at our next forum. In his update, Chris Myers said that the IJB is committed to all three of these actions.

Our Readiness for Engagement group has been establishing robust and consistent approach to applying and continuously improving our approach to lived experience engagement, within the internal working group representatives from different programmes within the ALLIANCE contribute to ensure that there is a diverse knowledge base and experience to support our engagement work and allow learning to be cascaded back to different teams.

The group explored our collective learning about good practice around engaging with people with lived experience and have developed a quality framework for engagement. Through this process the group has identified a wide range of engagement tools, templates, guides and policies to support our engagement work.

The learning gained has been used to supported the ALLIANCE’s wider engagement activity. For example, supporting the production of reports which summarise people’s experiences of organ transplant, low vision and diabetes services.

The ALLIANCE continues to lead the Third Sector Collaborative, in addition we have been invited onto Open Government health and social care commitment – civic society group as well the Strategic Commissioning Plans: Statutory Guidance Refresh – Short Life Working Group

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