Towards a community engagement strategy

Legislative and policy drivers have propelled community engagement to the top echelon of priorities for public bodies. They must now not only embed community engagement into their decision-making cycles, but also be able to demonstrate that engagement has had an influence. This means that whereas in the past engagement activity was unstructured and tended to occur typically onlyin the final phases of service commissioning and delivery planning, public bodies will now need to be systematic in ensuring that patients and the public are involved at every stage of the process. This article outlines a framework that will help public bodies to approach engagement morestrategically. It draws on the authors' experiences of cross-sectoral community engagement work to unpack the issues, methods and resources needed at every stage of the process.