Reflections from the first North West Surrey Alliance Community Day | News centre

  1. Text Size:
  2. Contrast:
Baby getting a check up

News and media releases from North West Surrey

If you have some news to share, would like to see us feature a patient story or simply have a question, then feel free to get in touch with us.

Get in touch

Reflections from the first North West Surrey Alliance Community Day

North West Surrey Community Day branding

Working as an Alliance across North West Surrey we continuously strive toward greater integration and collaboration of health, care, and wellbeing services for the benefit of our local community.

We recently held our first large-scale Community Day at the RHS Garden Wisley. The incredible setting intentionally set the tone for the type of environments we need around us to nurture our health and wellbeing. We even managed to bring a welcome burst of Spring sunshine to proceedings as over 200 people living, working, running businesses, supporting vulnerable people and raising families in our communities joined us.

This was an opportunity to showcase everything from local recruitment opportunities to the progress we’re making joining up the delivery of health, care and wider wellbeing services. That included hearing about people like, Avis who has regained her confidence after a series of falls following support from our Urgent Community Response Team who helped her to remain independent in her own home.

Watch Avis tell her story

We also shared our work with borough councils, without whom it wouldn’t be possible to offer initiatives like our Step Down Service. This is supported accommodation for people who are medically fit but need additional help on discharge from hospital. For local residents Wendy and Darren this made all the difference.

Watch their story

By harnessing digital innovation, we’re also helping staff like healthcare assistant, Helen to enjoy collaborating with colleagues across acute, community and primary care to run our dermatology photohub. This service uses the latest technology and artificial intelligence to speed up diagnosis and treatment of skin cancer.

Hear more about Helen's work

As well sharing our progress, it was a chance for local people to tell us what it feels like to be on the receiving end of our work. The energy and positive feedback on the day was hugely motivating but what really struck me was just how active our residents want to be in improving their own health and wellbeing.

North West Surrey community day image collage

Empowering people to take agency in this is the foundation of our work to develop neighbourhood teams. This follows recommendations from The Fuller Stocktake and our Critical 5 priorities, and means introducing multi-disciplinary teams to serve the needs of a defined footprint – with easy access to preventative support and tailored care when it’s needed.

Listening to the experiences of people from our communities and understanding their ideas for what a healthy and happy neighbourhood looks like opened up a different kind of dialogue about how we can influence the wider determinants of health. Considering transport and access, digital inequality, making it easier to navigate different services and liberating our community assets so they can take forward their own wellbeing initiatives, is all part of growing the neighbourhoods our residents want.

This is just the beginning of our work to involve people in our communities, the voluntary and charity sector to build cohesive services and cultivate environments where our residents can thrive.

Take a look at the highlights from the day in this short film

If you’re interested in how we’ll be using the outputs of our discussions – keep an eye on our website or drop us a line.

Jack Wagstaff

Place Leader / Alliance Chief Officer

Jack Wagstaff

This website makes use of Essential Cookies, as defined in the UK GDPR, in order to function and to improve your security, e.g. when submitting forms. These Essential Cookies are only for security and site function, and do not track individual in any way.

In order to better understand your needs and so improve our services to you, this website may also make use of some cookies that are used for traffic analytics or other behavioural statistics ("Analytics Cookies"): more details can be found on our website privacy and cookie statement.. If you are happy to accept these Analytics Cookies, please press the Accept button; if you are not happy to accept these Analytics Cookies, this site will still work correctly but some third party services (such as some videos or social media feeds) may not display.

Please choose a setting: