Patient and Public Involvement Clinical Reference Group

Terms of Reference

1.  Background and Constitution

Wandsworth Clinical Commissioning Group (WCCG) is built on a foundation of clinically led commissioning. We want to use the collective knowledge of clinicians to bring about both transactional and transformational change in how health services are delivered for our patients.

We have identified a number of areas requiring either clinical expertise or where leadership input would be invaluable. Patient and Public Involvement is one such area, and we have recruited a GP as Clinical Lead for PPI. To ensure PPI has senior leadership at Board level, we have also recruited a Board Lay Member with responsibility for PPI who will chair this Clinical Reference Group (CRG).

The Clinical Lead and Lay Member will be held accountable by the WCCG Clinical Lead/Chair with regular reporting at public CCG Committee meetings to evidence progress and transparency.

2. Philosophy of clinically led commissioning

To function effectively, the CRG will need to utilize the knowledge of its core members. CRGs will operate a philosophy of Ownership, Engagement and Action:

Ownership – owned by the Clinical Lead with agreed support from Commissioning and Public Health colleagues

Engagement – with all appropriate stakeholders including patients and carers, and clinicians across disciplines.

Action – ensuring actions (via an over-arching Action Plan) are delivered by the responsible owner and to agreed standards and deadlines.

Each CRG will embrace the culture of RAPIDE:

Rapid

Actions

Promoting

Innovation/Improvement

Delivery

Engagement

The CRG will be a forum for decision-making which will lead to rapid delivery on key actions with agreed ownership. Engagement of all members is pivotal to its success to ensure improvement can occur across the care-pathway/whole-system.

3.  Purpose of CRG

Primary Purpose

‘To embed the development and implementation of key actions/activities to deliver the effective involvement of patients, services users, carers and local communities of Wandsworth with the work of the CCG’.

Objectives

To continue to develop the PPI Reference Group so that it continues to meet the PPI needs of the CCG and to ensure it meets a minimum of 6 times per year.

To embed the Equality and Diversity agenda within the PPI agenda and wider within the CCG and to ensure that the Thinking Partners has a clear route of responsibility, so that its work can feed into the CCG

To support the development of PPI within the Clinical Reference Groups so that they can embed PPI within their workstreams

To support the development of PPI within localities to enable them to identify ways of capturing the patient voice at locality level and to feed this into the PPI RG

To take a whole organisation approach to PPI so that every aspect of CCG work is impacted[1] and to challenge CCG views so that PPI is successfully incorporated into its work

To ensure each member of the group understands their role and responsibilities within the PPI reference Group

To agree support and guide a detailed PPI Action plan for the following 12-months that supports all aspects of the work of the CCG

4.  Membership

Core Members

All members are responsible for contributing to the aims and objectives of the CRG as described above.

Person/Role (Organisation) / Person /Role (Patient Public representation)
PPI Lay Board Member - Chair / Appointed patient representative
Lead Director for PPI / Appointed patient representative
GP Clinical Lead / Appointed patient representative
PPI Management Lead / Appointed patientrepresentative
PPI Engagement Lead / Locality Group Representative –West Wandsworth
Locality Clinical Lead - Battersea / Locality Group Representative - Battersea
Locality Clinical Lead - Wandle / Locality Group Representative - Wandle
Locality Clinical Lead – West Wandsworth / Healthwatch representative
Comms and Engagement Lead / Community representative
Public Health Lead / Community representative
Wandsworth Borough Council representative / “Revolving” CRG Representative

Support members

To be co-opted onto CRG for specific tasks or meetings as requested by the Chair. For example, finance lead to advise on financial implications.

Sub-committees / working groups

·  The CRG can assign duties to a sub-committee providing there is clear understanding and ownership of what is required. Sub-committees may typically involve looking at a specific topic in detail.

·  Sub-committees should be time-limited.

The Lay Member of the Board with responsibility for PPI will chair the CRG. The GP Clinical Lead will be the Deputy Chair.

5. Accountability of the CRG

The Clinical Lead/Chair will present an annual report to the WCCG Board to be held in public.

The Clinical Lead/Chair for the CRG will be held accountable for ensuring agreed actions are completed by the Clinical Lead/Chair for WCCG.

All approved minutes to be available to the public via the WCCG Website

6. Frequency of and arrangement of Meetings

Meetings will be held every two months and last for no longer than 2.5 hours each time. The Clinical lead and Management Lead will meet in between meetings to ensure actions are delivered on time.

The Chair will agree the agenda following discussions with the Management Lead

Standing agenda items to include an update from each Lead AND to agree actions for the following period; reports from Equality and Diversity and Communications

A quorum of 5 members must be present to constitute a valid meeting, of which, one will be the Chair or appointed deputy, one will be a patient representative and one will be a GP lead.

To expedite decision-making, the Group can make agreements via e-mail – providing all core members are copied into correspondence and have a minimum of 48-hours to respond to messages.

7. Relationship with other bodies within the CCG

The Clinical Lead will represent the CRG at regular ‘forums/learning sets’ with other CRG Leads in order to share experiences, knowledge and advice.

Learning from the PPI CRG should underpin the work of all the others as it will provide an approach and learning to support the work of developing clinical pathways and service redesign.

Terms of Reference for Clinical Reference Groups, November 2013 Page 1 of 3

[1] An integral requirement of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, is to involve patients and carers in decisions about their care and treatment; in addition, ensure public involvement and consultation in processes and decisions in the planning of commissioning arrangements, proposed changes to services and in the monitoring, insight and evaluation of services. These duties are specified in the “Call to Action” by NHS England.