The NHS 10 Year Plan in Devon - Your priorities for change

From November 2024 to February 2025 the NHS in Devon ran local engagement around the 10 Year Health Plan in parallel with the national Change NHS campaign. 

All Devon residents were invited to share their experiences, views and ideas for improving the NHS either via the local survey or at engagement events happening across the county and online. 

This blog outlines our key engagement activities and support as part of this consultation.

Administration Support

• Freephone Number - We enabled people who are unable to submit their feedback online the chance to do it over the phone for free by calling us our HWDPT Freephone number.
• Freepost Address - We enabled people to send completed feedback postcards to us for free using our freepost HWDPT postal address and sent all these postcards to NHS Devon.
• Meetings – We attended various different weekly planning and update meetings, both externally with NHS colleagues and internally with key staff, to keep updated on the engagement and to update our NHS 10 Year Plan engagement workplan. This included weekly communications and engagement, pre-event planning and stakeholder meetings. 

Engagement Support 

• Locality Events – our engagement team and HW Champions attended the five locality workshop events in Paignton, Exeter, Barnstaple, Ivybridge and Plymouth, engaging with the public to gather their feedback on the plan.
• Chairing Workshops – key HWDPT staff members also chaired two workshops at each of these locality events, ten in total. They helped steer conversations back to the plan and allowed constructive feedback to be gathered effectively.
• Further events – In addition to the main locality events, our engagement staff promoted the NHS 10 Year Plan and gathered feedback via branded postcards at 42 smaller drop in events, talks and meetings. These included:

• University of Plymouth, Exeter College & Exeter University

• Derriford, Torbay, Exeter & Barnstaple General Hospitals

• Community Outreach in Teignbridge, Crediton, Exmouth, Harberton & Harbertonford

• Paignton, Torquay, Exeter, Newton Abbot, Ivybridge, Honiton, Okehampton,  St Budeaux & Barne Barton & Barnstaple libraries

• Buckfastleigh & Honiton Foodbanks

Communications Support

• Marketing – At all the events we attended we ensured NHS 10YP promotional material such as posters, leaflets and postcards were displayed publicly and left on display.
• Email Marketing - We shared NHS 10YP messages and links to the One Devon webpage and survey via email to all our key networks, including our HW Assist Network of 150 organisations, the VCSE sector and our near 3,000 email newsletter subscribers (on three separate occasions). In addition we sent out three separate NHS 10YP  ‘HW Stakeholder Briefings’ to hundreds of key health & social care stakeholders, including nationally via Healthwatch England.
• Press Releases – we sent out two separate NHS 10YP related press releases to local news and media outlets, which gathered local exposure. Example here on Plymouth Live.
• Website – A prominent banner was displayed at the top of each of the HW Devon, Plymouth and Torbay websites throughout the engagement, sharing NHS 10YP links and promoting the survey, with four separate news items uploaded during the consultation.
• Social Media – During the consultation we uploaded over 100 NHS 10YP posts on each of our Healthwatch Devon, Plymouth and Torbay Facebook, X (Twitter) and Instagram accounts to our thousands of followers. This included sharing our videos and event pictures.
• Promotional videos – we professionally produced four separate promotional videos for sharing on social media and online. These included the overarching video of all of the engagement below: