Annual Report and Accounts 2012/13 - Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital

122 5. Our Governors and Members
Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust
Annual Report and Accounts 2012/13
• Representative of the ethnic
diversity within the wider public
• Older than the general public
served by the Trust
• Marginally more likely to be
female than male.
For research purposes, engaging
with members about their priorities,
concerns and ideas for healthcare
provides a 'good enough' correlation
with the broader community. This
means that in our engagement with
members, we can be confident that
the views we hear can be said to be
sufficiently overlapping with what
members of the public generally would
say. This provides a useful rationale for
membership for Foundation Trusts.
Having a membership base allows a
meaningful relationship to be developed
between members and the Trust.
Developing this engagement helps
us to deepen our understanding of
their views and opinions which we
can correlate to the views of the wider
community. Developing an ongoing
dialogue with members provides an
opportunity for the Trust to develop its
thinking, test ideas, and give members
an overview of potential future
strategic options, which it can then
engage with members on in a way
that genuinely allows for influence and
boundary setting (e.g. options which
members would find unpalatable). This
proactive and timely way of engaging
with members is far preferable as a
way of enabling genuine stakeholder
engagement and influence than
the more orthodox approach taken
elsewhere in public service. Under this
type of model, changes are made or
formulated by a public body and then
views taken through consultation –
sometimes post-hoc. That is not to
say the methodology deployed by the
RD&E is perfect and it is important to
ensure that we guard against asking
the same set of people all the time,
and also to occasionally test whether
the views of members do correspond
to the views of the public more
generally.
The ongoing conversation with our
members – expressed primarily through
our Members Say events – is a very
important aspect of the Trust’s work
that provides genuine added value in
informing its work – whether that is
in a relatively minor operational detail,
potential service change, ways to
improve services in the best interests of
patients/public, or on bigger and more
strategic issues.
This makes it even more important,
therefore, that we have a membership
base that corresponds ever more
closely with the demographics of the
broader population served by the
Trust. The analysis undertaken of our
membership base shows that the Trust
needs to do more to encourage:
• Members from lower
socio-economic groups/more
urban settings
• Members who are younger than
the current membership profile
• More men to become members.
These shortcomings in the
representativeness of our membership
base do require work. However, they
are insufficiently significant to skew the
research undertaken with Members,
which we consider to be sufficiently
representative of the wider community.
The above points provide some priority
areas for more targeted recruitment by
the Member and Public Engagement
working group.