The NHS has long recognised the importance and value of patient and citizen engagement and there are many networks and systems to enable patients to provide input into service and programme delivery.

What the NHS could do better at is co-ordinating that patient involvement, co-ordinating activity so that patients and citizens are not asked the same or similar things by different health and social care organisations at the same time but through different engagement processes.

Our Open Citizen module attempts to address this co-ordination in respect of communication and engagement activities around Integrated Digital Care Record development.

We have already held an engagement workshop with the NHS England Patient Online group and the findings from this will help to shape how we undertake further events but also how the patient held record element of our OpenEHR (Electronic Health Record) could look and feel.

The sharing of information and learning between integration pioneers is part out our community approach.  As the Ripple Programme is hosted by Leeds City Council and working with the CCGs and the hospital in the City, we would like to take this opportunity to share the work of the Leeds Care Record.

The Leeds Care Record was commissioned by the three clinical commissioning groups in Leeds and developed by the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust built on their PPM+ patient information system.  Before, during and after the launch of Leeds Care Record, the project team undertook broad and intensive engagement with both patients and clinical staff and they have agreed that Ripple can adapt and “white label” the communication and engagement material for the integration pioneers (and others) to use.

The resources below have been released under the creative commons licence 4.0 and currently include Ripple branding and graphics that have been created from open source sources (if that isn’t tautology).  It is recognised that organisations and localities may wish to adapt and add their own branding but in essence, they are good to go.

As with all the resources we are developing – both technical and non technical – we would like your feedback.  If you have any documents or case studies that you would like others to be able to re-use or perhaps detail of when you have used the resources available through Ripple, we would like to hear from you.