At CWP Isla.jpgwe are incredibly proud to be an anchor institution, and we recently shared our updates with the Cheshire and Merseyside Anchor Assembly on Wednesday 24 July. We signed the Anchor Institution Framework in January earlier this year.  

The creation of the Anchor Assembly has provided an amazing platform for organisations to codify, articulate and promote the impact of embedding social value within their organisational approach. For CWP it is another way for us to consider and amplify the impact that we have through the way we work. The Partnership part of our name has always been important to us – meaningful and equitable partnerships with people who need and use our services, our communities and places, the system, and the VCSFE organisations who are a vital part of our services.

Our Imagining the Future Strategy is intentionally ambitious and recognises the importance we place on being active in influencing and promoting these partnerships in order to make a long lasting difference to the health and well being of our communities. This commitment is threaded through our governance, and part of the remit of all of our governance structures (as you would expect)… but the test of this commitment is in the impact it has. In thinking about our role as an anchor institution it can be hard for us to select the examples we want to tell you about… however, please find some below - we’ve tried to include a cross section. Allowing people to tell their own stories in their own voices is the CWP way, so alongside the written examples, we hope you get time to watch a few of the videos we have selected- there are many, many more stories on our YouTube channel. 

Examples of our work: 

This year the CWP board made a decision to put a strong emphasis on inclusion and equity. We did this because, despite having made really significant progress on a range of measures, we recognise that the pace of change in the NHS is still less than our communities deserve. We’ve diverted most of our board development time for this year to look at how we accelerate and amplify the impact of the work we do so that we make more of a difference on health inequality, and propagate equity for our workforce and communities.  

This year I am especially proud of:

  • The work we are doing to recruit increasing numbers of Health Care Assistants from our most deprived communities, and recognise them as a vital and skilled part of our workforce through initiatives like Heart of Care. This is increasing the diversity of our workforce, bringing in more people who have a biographical link to the services we provide and creating new progression routes into and through our teams.
  • Our continued work to make our workplaces and services more accessible for neurodiverse team members, including the implementation of our Trust Autism strategy, which was developed by autistic people.
  • Our meaningful engagement with VCFSE organisation, especially through longer term contracting so that we can grow and develop services together.
  • Our work with veterans, recognising their enormous contributions to our communities and workforce.
  • Our teams across the organisation, who build a commitment to social value into the way they work every day.

And, as always… there is so much more we want to do. We welcome the input of the Anchor Assembly and look forward to sharing ideas on how we can all do more, and galvanise as partners in our shared objective of improving the health and well being of the communities we serve.