IMPORTANT INFORMATION

This website is no longer being updated.

NHS Barnsley Clinical Commissioning Group has been legally dissolved and from 1 July 2022 has been replaced by a new organisation: NHS South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (SY ICB). NHS South Yorkshire ICB is now responsible for commissioning and funding of health and care services locally. Please go to our new website www.southyorkshire.icb.nhs.uk for information about the work of NHS South Yorkshire ICB and details about how to contact us.

Thank you.

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Our approach to involving you

Working across Barnsley

We are committed to ensuring that the needs of Barnsley people are at the heart of everything we do. To reflect our population, we aim to have effective patient, carer and public involvement embedded in our work and in our planning processes. We also hold the providers of the services we commission to account, to make sure they are involving you in any changes to, and developments of, services. Click here to see how we do this.

We engage with members of the public at the earliest opportunity in our decision making process. In addition to direct regular contact with our citizens through the OPEN network and borough-wide engagement meetings, we hear from harder to reach communities through tailored approaches and partnership working with HealthWatch Barnsley and Barnsley Council; and the voluntary, community and faith sector. We also identify opportunities for public representatives to be directly involved in our planning and decision making through participation in project meetings, partnership boards and procurement activities.

Many local people give their time and energy to engage with us on specific topics. Information about these activities can be found here. Sharing the outcomes of our decision making with the public, and highlighting where public voice has impacted on our plans and decisions is vitally important to building trust with our communities and encouraging more involvement.

Holding providers to account

We hold regular contract meetings with providers where we can discuss how they are communicating and involving services users, the public and staff. We also do this as part of our wider engagement network across Barnsley, where we work together. 

We also meet with Healthwatch Barnsley to share feedback and intelligence about local providers. Click here to  read the minutes from the Healthwatch Barnsley strategic advisory board meeting which describes some areas we are working on.

In this section you can read about:

Lay members

We have three Lay Members on our Governing Body, one with the specific role responsibility for patient and public engagement. They chair the Engagement and Equality Committee, the Primary Care Commissioning Committee as well as being a voting member and vice chair of the Governing Body. This further ensures there is a voice for patients and the public throughout our decision making and governance.

Overview and scrutiny

We regularly meet with and where relevant, consult with relevant Overview and Scrutiny Committees:

Working across South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw

Barnsley CCG is part of a partnership of 23 organisations responsible for looking after the health and care of the 1.5 million people living in Barnsley, Bassetlaw, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. This is called the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Integrated Care System.

We’re made up of NHS organisations, local authorities and key voluntary sector and independent partners in our region. Through working together, we have been chosen by NHS England as one of the first areas of the country to become an Integrated Care System.

An Integrated Care System is another way of describing the ambition we have locally, supported by our patients and staff, to ensure health and care services are the best they can possibly be. Working together in this way means that we will be able to better join up GPs and hospitals, physical and mental healthcare, social care and the NHS and give our patients the seamless care they have told us they want.

Through partnership working, we believe we can make real and long lasting improvements to the health of local people. As individuals and organisations working alone, we would never be able to achieve the same results.

You can get involved in the work happening across this area, in the same way you can here in Barnsley. We will share any opportunities on our website and you can also sign up for more information or check out the joint website for more details.

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NHS England guidance

We follow a set of guidance issued by NHS England which outlines best practice for enabling people to voice their views, needs and wishes, and to contribute to plans, proposals and decisions about services.

There are lots of ways you might want to get involved depending on your interests and your personal circumstances. There are different ways you can get involved and we will use these different approaches, depending on the circumstances.

Here are the different types of involvement - sometimes called the ladder of engagement.

Devolving
Placing decision-making in the hands of the local community and individuals. For example, this is how local Area Councils and Ward Alliances work across the borough. They can decide what the local priorities are for their area and fund services to support that, such as healthy eating or stop smoking support.It's also how personal health budgets work, which give people a budget to manage the support they need.  
Collaborating
Working in partnership with communities and individuals in each aspect of the decision, including the development of alternatives and the identification of preferred solution. For example, this is how people working and living in the Dearne area are coming together developing more joined-up services and setting their priorities of emotional wellbeing and young people.  
Involving
Working directly with communities and individuals to ensure that concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered. For example, this could be your local GP patient group, Barnsley Patient Councillocal support forums plus many more groups across the borough.  
Consulting
This is where we will gather community and individual feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions. For example through surveys, focus groups, events, etc. Here are some examples of when we have consulted on a range of topics.  
Informing
This is when we will provide communities and individuals with balanced and objective information to help people understand problems, alternatives, opportunities and solutions. This might be on our website for example, or our social media pages or through letters, newsletters or leaflets.  


Collaboration in practice

Here is an example of how we worked in collaboration with some brilliant young young people here in Barnsley and a range of different services to develop a short film.

In 2018 our safeguarding children's nurse got in touch with our communications team to ask for some advice and support on a project with young people in Barnsley. The aim of the project was to develop something for children and young people who were entering care and would need a health assessment with a doctor.

This is often a very upsetting time and everything is done by the different agencies involved to help make this journey as smooth as possible. A health assessment by a doctor can seem very daunting. So we worked with a group of young people in Barnsley who had experienced this themselves to write a script, record the voice overs and produce a short film, which could be played to anyone needing an assessment in the future.

A massive thank you to everyone who worked together on this really useful resource.

Here is the result of this collaboration:

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Commissioning cycle

Commissioning cycle

We want you to be involved in all the different parts of how we commission services. This diagram helps to identify ways in which patients and the public can engage and participate in the different stages of the commissioning cycle.

A more detailed version of this drawing is in our involvement strategy where you can see what involvement takes place at each stage.

Strategic planning - this is where we assess the needs of local communities and work with communities and individuals to plan priorities and develop services.

Procurement - this is when we have made a decision to contract with someone for a health service. Where possible, we recruit people with direct experience of the relevant condition to be on the panel of people who assesses the bids. We offer training on what procurement is, what the role will involve and specific training for online scoring systems and moderation panels. We also offer support for you to be able to take part and out of pocket expenses for people who give their time to be on a panel in line with our patient and public involvement policy which can be accessed here

Here is an example of a role description for joining a procurement panel. We promote all opportunities to be involved in procurement on our current opportunities page 

After people take part in the panels, we ask them if there's anything we could have done differently to improve the experience for others who may take part in the future. 

"I think being given a good explanation of the process at the training session really helped me to understand my role. I was also made to feel at ease at the moderation panel"  2019/20

"I found the portal very easy to use, it was intuitive and easy to navigate. Support from all CCG staff I had contact with was appreciated. An enjoyable experience." 2019/20

"I found the whole process very interesting and insightful" 2019/2020 

Monitoring and evaluating - we regularly collect and monitor patient experience feedback from a range of sources. This might be direct from the service provider, from compliments and complaints, from national surveys such as the GP patient survey or the national cancer patient experience survey for example. We also hold regular meetings with Healthwatch Barnsley where the feedback on general themes. We also receive Care Quality Commission (CQC) reports on the services we commission.