Cheshire & Merseyside Health Care Partnership

What is Firestarters?

Firestarters is a community of values-driven organisations striving to be a force for good in the Liverpool City Region (LCR). Through live events driven by action, insight, and social impact, Firestarters provides private, public, and third sector organisations with the support and resources they need to be the change they want to see.

The Event

By reaching out to our Firestarters community, we were able to bring together 15 of the region’s brightest, socially-driven organisations and individuals, whose expertise would help make CMHCP’s ethical framework as comprehensive and inclusive as possible.

We asked these guests, including Wirral and Liverpool City Councils, the NHS, and Integrated Health and Social Care, to consider the question: “How do we create a relevant, sustainable ethical framework for health and social care across Cheshire and Merseyside to enable greater personalised care?”

This helped to focus discussions about how CMHCP‘s framework would:

• Address health inequalities across the region
• Promote better health outcomes and wellbeing practices

Keynote speaker

To help attendees better understand CMHCP’s ideas for their new framework, we decided to open the event with a keynote speech. Our keynote speaker was Dave Sweeney, Executive Director of Partnerships at CMHCP, who began by explaining why the previous frameworks didn’t produce the results they had wanted.

Dave outlined some of the challenges the new framework hoped to address and clarified what CMHCP meant by ‘ethical framework’ and ‘personalised care’. This ensured that discussions after the keynote speech were as relevant, applicable, and helpful to CMHCP as possible.

Breakout rooms

We curated our breakout rooms to make sure discussions between guests were varied and balanced, with everyone given the time and the space to offer their opinions. Not only did this mean all attendees were listened to, it also made sure that the feedback CMHCP received was wide-ranging and reflective of the various backgrounds and experiences of our region.

Members of our team facilitated and recorded each breakout room’s conversations, using three questions to help get the most out of discussions:

• How do you imagine a new ethical framework?
• How can your own experiences inform how we approach those challenges?
• What does good personalised care look like?

One of the key points raised in all three breakout rooms was the need for health and social care providers to trust patients more if they are to provide truly personalised care – something we were able to feed back to CMHCP in our post-event Insights Report.

The Outcomes

We provided CMHCP with:

• A recording of the entire event for them to refer back to
• A detailed Insights Report, highlighting the region’s most pressing health inequalities and ways to significantly overcome some of the problems of CMHCP’s previous frameworks

These concerns and solutions included:

• Connectivity – the communication and interconnectivity between different agencies in delivering personalised care
• Resources – the scarcity of healthcare resources geared to personalisation
• Simplicity – clear and digestible messaging
• Empowerment – empowering patients and providers at all levels of the framework

As a result of the event, Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership was able to:

• Host an expertly facilitated conversation
• Access and engage with a diverse range of curated stakeholders
• Gain actionable insights
• Better understand the region’s health inequalities
• Determine the best ways to promote better health outcomes according to the region’s most purpose-driven organisations