LINk Legacy Document – who should you send it to?

Posted: February 21, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Annual Reports, Local Healthwatch, Local Involvement Networks | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Since blogging on the LINk Legacy Document, I’ve been asked where LINks should send their Legacy Documents.

The Department of Health has told me that these documents are ‘primarily to inform local conversations’ – and in short, there is no one nationally who is collecting these. This seems a bit of a shame, as there must be lots of excellent work that is being gathered into these documents.

Anyway, here’s my list of people that I think could be on your Legacy Doc circulation list:

  • Your LINk commissioner
  • Your Local Healthwatch Commissioner
  • Your Healthwatch provider
  • PCT (outgoing!)
  • CCG (incoming!)
  • CQC contacts
  • Foundation Trusts
  • Independent Health Providers
  • Chair of your Health & Wellbeing Board (Maybe the whole Health & Wellbeing Board)
  • Councillor with oversight of Local Healthwatch contract
  • Your LINk mailing list
  • Your ‘LINk friends’ – FT Governors and others who have worked closely with you etc.
  • Local community groups and organisations that have an interest in Healthwatch

Let me know if you think there’s anyone else that I’ve missed!

It would also be worth publishing online in the following locations:

You can also use lots of your Legacy info in your Annual Report, which you should also upload to the Healthwatch England Information Hub in due course.

If you have any other ideas, let me know!

P.S. A great piece of LINk Legacy Work from Luton LINk

Debbie Roberts who has worked with the Luton LINk published this fab piece of work on the LINks Exchange website, which I love. She said: “In Luton one of the [Legacy] conversations was captured using graphic facilitation. Attached is the image of the wall map. Its size was around 3.5m x 1.5m and it had a strong impact on the people in the conversation and was a great tool to share messages with others.”

Luton LINk Legacy picture

Luton LINk Legacy picture – click for larger image

I love an infographic and if I was Luton Healthwatch, I would decorate the Healthwatch office using this as wallpaper. 🙂

Department of Health Evaluation of LINks

Posted: February 3, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Annual Reports, Info about LINks | Tags: , | Leave a comment

>> Department of Health Evaluation of LINks

On 29th December 2010 the Department of Health released it’s ‘evaluation’ of LINks, which was based on all of the previous years’ LINk’s Annual Reports that it could get its paws on.

This report resulted in the following two articles in the Health Service Journal, which I think are both worth a read (if you are a subscriber! If not, contact me and I’ll send them to you):

What to do with this data:

The DH evaluation contains some nice summaries giving the ‘England average’ of LINks for things like membership, reports, Enter & View visits etc. This might be useful information when compiling your own reports e.g. “Our membership currently stands at 700, which is 80% more than the average LINk according to blah blah”.

There are also some nice case studies which really don’t show any tangible service changes but are nicely worded to reflect the LINk’s input in a positive way. This is encouraging as it shows that the work of the LINk is recognised even when a measurable outcome might not be easy to pin down. It also gives some good ideas for wording our own case studies for our annual reports.