We want to hear from all parts of the community. We want a membership reflecting where our patients come from in the country and also users drawn from the full range of services.
We aim in the long term to recruit a membership whose ethnic diversity is close to that of our patients. We are keen to hear quieter voices and those from socially excluded groups.
Our Foundation Trust membership is free and open to anyone in England and Wales aged over 10 years who shares our vision.
People can choose their own level of involvement, but we see membership as being the main way for patients, their families and the public to be directly involved in improving what we do. We have already recruited more than 8,400 members, around 1,000 of which are young people. And we have begun to use them in a variety of ways to help us improve.
Electing the Members’ Council is one important way members will be involved. We hope that members will feel a real sense of involvement and achievement as we improve the hospital together.
We already seek to value, involve and develop our staff, who are highly committed to the organisation and its values. We believe staff membership offers greater involvement in our strategic direction and purpose, and this will reinforce this sense of staff ownership.
Staff union representatives are closely involved in how we plan our Foundation Trust application and how we consult staff on it.
We are already involving patients, families and public members in many ways
Slightly more than half of our members have expressed a desire to be directly involved through consultations or possibly doing a specific piece of work for us. We provide specific opt-ins for involvement and members can change these if they want. All members also receive a regular newsletter with options on how to get involved.
Our parents have developed a charter,
GOSH parents say, particularly around communication and expectations. Patients produced a film,
GOSH what a hospital, which set out their own expectations of us.
The charter and the film are now used in all staff training and compulsory update training. Our patient and family satisfaction is regularly monitored by an independent market research company and the questions used are based on what patients and their families told us they found important. We seek the views of young people directly as well as those of their families.
We have recruited members to help with a wide range of issues. This has covered more traditional areas of patient and public involvement, such as food, making new buildings easy to understand and navigate, decor and cleanliness.
We have also involved members in specific clinical management projects, such as running our theatres more efficiently, giving ward sisters more power, or reducing infections. We have recruited parents to sit on interview panels for senior staff.
A member chairs the committee looking at equality and diversity. We have surveyed members on developments in our clinical strategy and they are closely involved in these consultation plans.
We have more to do in developing our membership but we hope that we have shown a genuine willingness to involve members in innovative ways, embracing their enthusiasm, ideas and the challenges they make us face.
Involving children and young people
Children and young people differ in age, attitude and abilities; babies, toddlers, children and teenagers have different needs, medically and socially.
Listening to children and young people is central to our vision and we have a strategy to achieve this. We are rightly praised for being child focused in our clinical work but we want to be better at listening to children and young people in service and strategic planning.
In addition to our own expertise, we will draw on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and excellent practice from government bodies, the health service and charities.
A series of different mechanisms, formal and otherwise, have been and will be used. These have included
- A highly successful young people’s consultation day event
- Telephone interviews
- Peer interviews (young members trained to interview other young people to facilitate their own consultation)
- Video
- Small group work
- A write or draw cartoon booklet
- Web-based surveys and bulletin boards
- Text messaging
- In the future, more use of social networks, bedside surveys and other similar ideas.
The independent group, Expert Patient Programme, and our website Children First for Health are other ways young people can be more involved in their own healthcare.
Young people can become a Foundation Trust member from the age of ten. We continue to give careful thought as to how younger members and Councillors might be encouraged and supported so that their voices may be heard.
The vision for children and young people’s involvement is the same as for adults – we hope they will bring great value to our work, including forcing us to think in more imaginative and engaging ways about how we listen to everyone.
What’s the difference between Foundation Trust membership and the charity’s Friends membership scheme?
Foundation Trust membership involves members being consulted on plans and services as well as electing most of the Members' Council.
Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity runs a Friends membership scheme. Friends support the work of the hospital financially through regular giving. Their fundraising supports the work of the Play Team throughout the hospital.
We encourage people to consider joining both schemes, if they can.
To become a
Foundation Trust member fill in our
online membership form or call
020 7239 3131.
To become a
Friends member, log on to
www.gosh.org/friends or call
020 7239 3131.
