Minutes:
Rosemary Hassoon indicated that the patient reference group had been told that there would be no patient reference groups in the future due to staff having to work with frontline staff. The past year public involvement had been greatly reduced from one-month meetings to two months then the last meeting was cancelled. The Mental Health Strategic Partnership Board had not met for 15 months so they were concerned at what was happening now and plans for future public involvement.
Sarah Burns, Head of Integrated Commissioning responded that at this point in time many of the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) staff had to pause their regular work to enable them to support the vaccination programme and other essential work around COVID. This was not something that they took lightly but had to put their resource in areas of absolute need during an urgent crisis situation. They valued their engagement groups, it was purely a short-term issue of capacity while staff were redeployed and they had to prioritise for COVID response and they would expect those groups to be up and running again in the future and was an unfortunate consequence of the COVID situation.
Rosemary Hassoon responded that they were aware of the demise of the CCGs in April next year and asked what the plans for their future engagement were.
The Head of Integrated Commissioning responded that they were waiting for national guidance around Integrated Cares Systems (ICS) and there was an item on that subject on the agenda today and indicated that the group was extremely valuable to them. Engagement in Durham was never going to change and they would have strong place based working and engagement with patients and the public and stakeholders would always be part of those arrangements but they did now know the form that would take at the moment, it would exist but the how was to be determined.