NHS Assembly: NHS@75 – An invitation to have your say
The NHS’s 75th birthday is an opportunity to appreciate and reflect on the NHS’s importance in providing healthcare services to everyone and to acknowledge the challenges that the NHS currently faces while considering how the NHS should develop in the future.
The NHS Assembly has been asked by NHS England to lead a rapid engagement and insight gathering exercise so it can summarise key learning from the NHS’s recent past and highlight future opportunities and challenges.
The engagement will be in the form of collaborative conversations among groups including royal colleges, health system leaders, frontline staff and clinicians, patients and the voluntary and community sector.
The engagement period will close at 23.59pm on Friday 26 May.
Invitation
As part of the NHS@75 project, the NHS Assembly is inviting you to capture insights from your colleagues and associated networks.
The contributions that you capture through the conversations with your colleagues and networks will help inform findings that will be shared with NHS England and partners across the NHS.
Conversation facilitators are asked to:
- Organise a conversation with their colleagues and/or networks
- Use the feedback template to capture key insights in the room from these conversations.
- Submit a summary outcome to the online feedback form by 23:59pm on Friday 26 May.
In facilitating your conversations, please consider:
- Existing meetings that you may already have arranged in your diary, and networks that you may already be well-connected to
- How to get a mix of colleagues – consider colleagues at different levels of seniority and different durations of service
Diversity of colleagues – consider colleagues from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, ages, genders, people who have disabilities and others with protected characteristics. This will provide the broadest range of experience and ensures we place diversity and inclusion at the heart of this exercise.
Template form for discussion feedback
Download the discussion feedback template (Word)
The following speaking notes are designed to support a facilitator to chair conversations on NHS@75.
- The 75th birthday of the NHS on 5 July 2023 is an opportunity for all of us who value our health and care system to take stock together and look forward. This discussion is in response to an invitation from the NHS Assembly to contribute to that collective conversation.
- The NHS Assembly (consider an introduction to the NHS Assembly if relevant) brings together a range of individuals from across the health and care sectors at regular intervals to provide independent advice to the board of NHS England. These include senior clinical and operational leaders, patient representatives, leaders of health charities and other partners such as local government.
- We are being asked to share ideas across three big areas:
- How far has the NHS come in 75 years?
- Where is it now?
- What would you like from the NHS in the future?
- There are seven specific questions under these themes.
- The aim is to have an open and honest conversation, recognising the challenges faced in the NHS today as well as celebrating what is great about the NHS and how we want to see it develop.
- Similar conversations are being held by staff, patient groups and others across the country.
- This conversation will help inform findings which will be shared by the NHS Assembly with NHS England’s leadership in advance of the 75th Birthday.
- The NHS Assembly will also be informed by latest insights from the NHS Staff Survey and other sources such as patient views from Healthwatch England.
Any views that you share will be fed back anonymously (in ways that individuals can’t be identified).