Customer story: Stockport Clinical Commissioning Group, UK

Online patient and public engagement

Stockport CCG are publicly committed to engaging with patients and stakeholders whenever they make any substantial change to local healthcare services.

Consultation is a critical part of their work to ensure that stakeholders have the chance to comment on and help to shape NHS services in the area.

Traditionally, patient engagement had been carried out via paper surveys and comment cards – but this came with high associated costs and limits in terms of accessibility. Stockport CCG were also keen to do more to engage with marginalised audiences – so they looked to improve their online consultation offering.

Stockport CCG chose to use Citizen Space

Citizen Space is cloud-based software for managing your public involvement activity in one place.

Stockport CCG now use Citizen Space as the hub for all their public consultations - often publishing several per week, and striving to gain insights from hard-to-reach or very specific social groups.

They make extensive use of Citizen Space’s ability to provide contextual information to participants. For example, in a consultation focused on deaf patients, they were able to provide a sign language video of each question, and more, to give additional background information on the issues at hand.

This is just one example of the CCG's extensive use of Citizen Space. For instance, they have used it to:

• take iPads into GP surgeries in order to consult directly with patients – collecting their views digitally without having to carry out time-consuming data entry.
• share and use feedback from engagement. Using the ‘We Asked. You Said. We Did.’ feature, Stockport shares the outcome of all public consultations.
• add another component to their engagement process. Stockport CCG has a very robust consultation practice which includes focus groups, community meetings and events, paper-based surveys and patient reference groups. Citizen Space adds depth to this practice and enables the group to consult many more people than they had been able to previously.