The challenge

East Surrey has been on a long journey towards achieving integration. Throughout this journey, the health and care partner organisations working locally have maintained a strong focus on delivering high quality care.

They have fostered excellent clinical relationships across the system but have not always been able to achieve consistent system working at all levels. They recognised the importance of coming together as a place and shared a strong commitment to delivering their shared ambitions for their population in partnership.

The approach

We have been working with East Surrey to support them to develop a shared vision and identity as a partnership, in order to aid the delivery of shared priorities. Working in the context of Covid-19, and the challenges of bringing large groups of people together around post-its and flipchart paper, we supported East Surrey to create an approach to engagement that did not depend on everyone being in the same room at the same time but that kept the power of collaboration and shared ideas.

We used a methodology we call the ‘Big Conversation’, which involved a series of engagements across a number of platforms including workshops, discussion fora and an online whiteboard to maximise opportunities for people to connect and share ideas across East Surrey.

The impact

As a result of this engagement, we were able to bring people together to co-design East Surrey’s vision, values and behaviours, a new visual identity, and a set of agreed priorities to support East Surrey in delivering their new model of care. More importantly, the approach has built new relationships and developed existing ones across the partnership. This has enabled key people to have more honest and challenging conversations about how to develop East Surrey as a place, built on a foundation of trust.

“Overall PPL were a fantastic team and I am really grateful for their support. We have had feedback from system partners that East Surrey is unrecognisable from where we were before and I can categorically say that we would not have got to where we are without PPL.”

Sumona Chatterjee, East Surrey Place Based Leader, Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care System