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Patient Partnership Week
PCC Chair, Ruth Sutherland, CBE, marks the importance of Patient Partnership week and the potential of developing a partnership approach to delivering public services in Northern Ireland.
This is Patient Association’s Patient Partnership week. The week is focusing on the simple but powerful truth that health and social care works best when people are treated as partners in their health and care.
This is a truth that the PCC has been focusing on and promoting for a period of time. In October 2025, working in collaboration with NICON, we published a report – People to Partners, Developing a Unique Approach for Northern Ireland. In developing this report - and fulfilling our statutory remit to represent the best interests of the public in health and social care - we brought together senior government officials, leaders from the community and voluntary sector and members of the public with lived experience. We collectively explored the potential and advantages of a new relationship with the public in delivering health and social care, and wider public sector goals.
The potential advantages were clear, from improved public agency and civic engagement, to services that are more effective in meeting public need, enhanced safety and increased trust in institutions and organisations.
But what do we mean by working in partnership with the public?
At heart it is about a more collaborative approach to the development, delivery and evaluation of services. In Health and Social Care, we have historically had a paternalistic approach. We have had a ‘do to’ the public culture, where professionals and organisations know best. Mounting evidence suggests that we will get better outcomes if we shift to a ‘do with’ approach to care and services, where the public’s opinions are listened to, respected and when appropriate acted upon. The system shift is from a transactional to relational culture. People and their public services working together for best outcomes.
The public are experts by experience in their own lives and health, the care and services they receive and the ability of those services to deliver for them. To tap into this expertise requires listening, a sharing of power and a willingness to respond. It is about ensuring that the voice of the public and their communities are listened to and given weight when services are being developed, commissioned, delivered and evaluated.
The recent publication of the Muckamore Abbey Hospital Public Inquiry report has also given us a clear and stark understanding of what can happen when individuals and families are not listened to and not treated as partners in their, or their loved ones’ care.
Listening to and hearing people and family’s experiences should be the first line of defence when safeguarding vulnerable people and delivering patient safety. The inquiry report recognised that ‘patients and families are experts by experience and are sometimes better placed than staff or health experts to comment’.
Multiple inquiries have demonstrated that having your voice heard by the right people, in the face of power imbalances and complex systems and structures can be extremely difficult. Adopting a systemic partnership and relational approach, which respects and gives weight to the public’s voice is critical to avoiding another damaging and traumatic scandal. Developing regionalised independent advocacy services are also a vital aspect of this approach.
We welcome the response to PCC’s report and influencing work, which has been very positive. The principle of People as Partners has been adopted by the HSC system as the fourth shift necessary to deliver upon the Minister for Health’s Reset Plan and is influencing thinking across the system. This is unique in the UK and should be commended. Next will be to embed the principle, through systemic culture change, into practice. The core recommendation from the report was to develop a Strategic Partnership Framework for the delivery of services in Northern Ireland. Such a framework could provide the principles and practical tools to turn a welcomed concept into a practical reality for the public.
PCC, like the Minister for Health, recognises that the determinants of individual and population health are not the responsibility of one Executive Department. PCC will be leading on a partnership approach from within health and social care, but the possibilities of working differently with the public spans across all public services and Departments.
