National Care Service - keeping care support local part 1 – local services: regional forums - findings summary

How we ran the sessions

People who attended took part in group discussions and completed group exercises.

A week before each event, we sent participants a summary of the questions we would be asking during the session. This also included some of what we had learned from previous research (Annex A).

On the day, we explained the discussion topics and provided written information to make sure the questions were clear.

During the sessions, we asked people to talk about their community health and social care support needs at a local level. The topics we covered were:

• how people's experience of accessing social care support and community health services is shaped by the local area they live in
• how people would like to participate in strategic decision-making processes about social care services in their local area
• people's hopes for how the National Care Service will meet their local needs

In the second half of the session people were split into groups. Each group discussed a different question. All of the questions were about people’s hopes for how local services would work within the National Care Service.

We also collected feedback about how people felt the session itself went at the end and used this information to improve how other sessions were planned.

This was to make the regional forums as accessible as possible for participants and to make sure we were asking the right questions. Because of this, the discussion questions changed slightly between the first regional forum and the last regional forum.