FAQs
How was the strategy developed?
In developing this strategy, we created genuine dialogue and collaboration with the people connected to us, inviting a broad range of community-based stakeholders to focus groups, interviews, surveys and listening posts.
Through this process we heard from our consumers, staff, volunteers, service-delivery partners, advocates and stakeholders, including general practitioners, about what is important to you.
SALHN’s Community Engagement Sub-Committee developed the strategy before being endorsed by the Board in August 2021.
What does the strategy include?
The strategy is intended for both internal and external audiences. It provides key contextual information and an overview of our profile, what is community engagement, who is our community, our vision for community engagement, and how we will engage with our community.
This strategy is intended to guide our approach to community engagement. We want to:
- Create strong, trusting, and meaningful relationships with our community to better align our clinical services to our community’s needs based on projected population changes. Many such relationships already exist, and our aim is to strengthen them.
- Achieve excellence in person and family-centred care, to build partnerships to improve and innovate, to become a destination for world-class research and training, and to ensure academic and evidence-based research is aligned to clinical care.
- Ensure you, the citizens in our community, can access information about health and help you develop knowledge about your own health and the health system that supports you now and into the future.
- Create more opportunities for our community to help us plan, deliver and evaluate our health care and systems. We will engage in a meaningful way and we will support you to participate.
How will SALHN implement the strategy?
We want to be an active partner with our community. Our aim is to support our community over the next three years to:
- better understand your own health and the health system that supports you through health education
- participate in activities that help shape health care now and into the future
- embrace new technologies and ways of receiving health care to improve health outcomes for everyone in the community.
How will we do this? Community engagement is about relationship development, informed decisions and capacity building. These concepts are not mutually exclusive and they can work hand-in-hand. Each is an essential goal, which will help us achieve our vision.
GOAL: Develop and sustain meaningful, effective relationships with our wider communities, between our workforce, including our leadership and clinical services, our research partnerships, our consumers and our established consumer advisory groups.
GOAL: Provide engagement opportunities for our community to inform the decisions we make to enhance the planning, design, delivery and evaluation of our services, processes, systems, infrastructure, strategies and policies.
GOAL: Continue to build the capacity of our community internally and externally, to support effective community engagement and relationships from design to delivery and evaluation feedback.
How will SALHN measure success and track progress towards our goals?
We will undertake the work needed to meet our goals in a phased approach over the next three years.
PHASE 1: Understanding our stakeholders and developing relationships, establishing engagement approaches and building a community engagement plan with measures of success, tools and training.
PHASE 2: Equipping our community for engagement opportunities, and providing the tools and training developed in phase one to create informed decisions.
PHASE 3: Ongoing support for community engagement, making sure it is embedded into our organisational policy and governance, service design and provision by evaluating against our developed measures of success.
We will communicate progress regularly to our stakeholders, through our established consumer advisory groups, communication channels and activities, such as our Community Chats series. Reporting on our community engagement efforts will also be made to leadership groups and governing bodies. We will formally report on our community engagement achievements against our developed measures of success in our annual report on the Southern Adelaide Local Health Network
