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Built by Out of Place Studio
The Big Leeds Chat is a key event in the diary for all the people involved in planning health and care services. This is an opportunity to go out into all the local communities in Leeds, listen to people and understand how we become the best city for health and wellbeing. Starting in 2018, there have been three Big Leeds Chats, each one changing and adapting to grow, strengthen and make sure we are hearing everyone’s voice in Leeds, both in the different places that people live and with the city’s many different communities.
The idea of the Big Leeds Chat is very simple: we want to put the people of Leeds at the heart of health and care decision making. As well as all the work happening to listen to people’s experiences, we believe it’s vital that services listen directly to people, in their communities. So for each Big Leeds Chat, we have gone out together, not as different organisations, but as one team who all work to make health and care services better in Leeds. This is Team Leeds, and we are there to do the listening.
We have gone directly into the centre of communities rather than expecting people to come to meetings, from markets to coffee mornings and parks to community groups all across Leeds. And we have gone to listen – to really listen – about what makes a good, happy and healthy life, and understand what needs to be done differently.
This autumn, as we emerged out of lockdown, we thought it was really important to listen to people about their experiences. Ambitiously, in times of COVID we strove to develop the Big Leeds Chat even further and go far and wide, having over 40 Chats in communities across Leeds. This is by far the most we have ever had. We met so many brilliant and inspiring people who live and work in their communities, acting together to make them the best places to live. We heard a lot about the strength and resilience of each of those places, but also the challenges they are facing in health and care.
We hope you enjoy reading this report. It tells the story of where we went, the people we met and what is important to them in terms of health and wellbeing in Leeds. Importantly, it tells the story of what our decision makers took away and how they will use this information as we move forward to become the best city for health and wellbeing.
Finally, a big “thank you” to all the people who donned their yellow Big Leeds Chat t-shirts and who spoke with us, and to the decision makers and chat makers who joined us on the tour. We will now go on to use this insight to shape health and care services in the future.
In Leeds we have an ambition, led by our People’s Voice Partnership, to make sure the voice of people is at the heart of all levels of health and care planning. Most especially, we want to ensure that residents experiencing the greatest health inequalities are at the heart of everything we do. This is essential if we are to achieve the ambition in our Health and Wellbeing Strategy to improve the health of the poorest the fastest.
The Big Leeds Chat is an innovative, citywide approach to support this ambition. It brings senior leaders from across the health and care system together with the public as one
#TeamLeeds, so that they can listen to people’s experiences around health and wellbeing, in the broadest sense of the term, and find out what matters most to them.
The first Big Leeds Chat included more than 500 conversations in Kirkgate market in October 2018. A year later, we again called in at Kirkgate market (which was even busier than the year before), and we also worked with Local Care Partnerships and settings such as food banks to get out into Leeds’ many communities.
By 2021, the world had changed a lot, and we knew it was more important than ever that we get out to listen to people, given the way the pandemic had deepened health inequalities across the country.
We connected up with Local Care Partnerships to organise a local Big Leeds Chat in each area, as well as Community of Interest groups and young people’s organisations. In keeping with our ambition, we wanted to hear from as broad a range of people as we could, not least those who had faced some of the toughest circumstances over the past 18 months.
All in all, 43 chats were had from September through to November, involving dozens of decision makers and chat makers who came along from every health and care organisation to support the conversations.
© 2022 All rights reserved
Built by Out of Place Studio
