Your Voice in BOB

Man with headphone talking into a phone

We want to understand your communities needs, ideas, experiences and aspirations for health and care in your local area.

By working in partnership with people and communities we can make better decisions about health service changes and how money is spent.

Our engagement team is listening. Share your thoughts and help us address health inequalities by helping us understand what works, as well as ways in which health and care services can develop to help you.

You choose the topic, whatever matters most to you and share your feedback or ask a question below and we will ensure that insight helps to shape relevant projects and services across BOB.


We want to understand your communities needs, ideas, experiences and aspirations for health and care in your local area.

By working in partnership with people and communities we can make better decisions about health service changes and how money is spent.

Our engagement team is listening. Share your thoughts and help us address health inequalities by helping us understand what works, as well as ways in which health and care services can develop to help you.

You choose the topic, whatever matters most to you and share your feedback or ask a question below and we will ensure that insight helps to shape relevant projects and services across BOB.


Share your feedback or ask a question

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  • It's not clear to me what the essential difference is between Healthwatch - a longstanding, and in my view effective point of access for patient involvement, and Your Voice. The two seem to have similar roles and objectives and share the same goals and language - engagement, feedback, listening, working in partnership, sharing reliable information etc. Both bodies claim to have the ear of ICB officers to whom the feedback from patients/the public and their response to it can be channeled. Can you explain the rationale for setting up Your Voice when HealthWatch seem to be carrying out a similar role on a very limited budget. Surely it would be better to combine forces and budgets and not re-invent the wheel yet again. Having said that it is encouraging that Your Voice and HWO have agreed to work together to clarify their respective roles and hopefully this could avoid overlap and duplication in the future.

    Maggie Winters asked 5 months ago

    Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and Healthwatch both play crucial roles in public involvement within the healthcare system, but they have distinct statutory functions and responsibilities. ICBs are part of the NHS structure and are responsible for planning and purchasing (commissioning) health services in their local areas. Their statutory public involvement duties include working in partnership with people and communities to improve services and meet public involvement legal duties.

    Healthwatch operates at both national and local levels to represent the views of the public on health and social care services. Their statutory functions include gathering public views about their needs and experiences with local health and social care services. Healthwatch makes reports and recommendations to improve services and promotes public involvement in monitoring, commissioning, and providing health and social care services.

    Your Voice is the online platform that NHS Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West Integrated Care Board uses to carry out surveys and create conversations in a digital space. As the ICB develops its approach to engaging with our communities we are developing this site and have developed a hub for each or our three places. Your Voice as means of communication to complement any activity that they are carrying out.

    Following recent feedback from discussions with PPGs, some of the functionality of Your Voice would be beneficial for PPGs to use as they have variety of approaches and resources to support them, our intention is to work with Healthwatch to ensure that any resources that are available for PPGs are placed on Your Voice so that PPGs are able to access these. This also gives a space for countywide PPG conversations for learning and sharing.

    Your Voice also allows for PPGs to raise in a structured way common queries to the ICB, if there are multiples of the same queries it allows us as an ICB to gather this feedback, in a themed way and respond in a structured way using internal topic experts to help answer the queries being raised.

    Your Voice isn’t a replacement to Healthwatch, it is just an online platform to help improve engagement and increase the numbers of people we can reach.

Page last updated: 07 Feb 2024, 01:39 PM