Community Engagement in Primary Care

Event date: 10 November 2020

Event time: drop-in sessions between 9:30am and 3:00pm

This Scotland-wide online event showcased examples of how primary care is engaging with communities and provided an opportunity to:

  • share experiences of community engagement and learn from others
  • learn from and ask questions of an expert
  • hear about examples of community engagement in action
  • find out about how community engagement is continuing during the challenges of COVID-19
  • discuss how to tackle some of the barriers to community engagement

Learning session 1 (45 minutes)

Planning Engagement: Why? What? Who? When? Where? - Richard Kennedy-McCrea (Healthcare Improvement Scotland)

Too often when planning community engagement we jump straight to developing a survey or arranging some meetings (the "how"). It is important to take a step back and consider the other questions as well.

Engagement Case Studies and Q&A (60 minutes)

In this session we discuss 3 different case studies of community engagement from various parts of Scotland:

  • Aberdeen Diabetes Peer Support Network
  • Western Isles GP Practice Facebook Group
  • Ayrshire and Arran mpower project

A short presentation of the case studies was followed by questions from the participants.

Discussion and networking (45 minutes)

Three facilitated discussion groups allowed participants to share their experiences of community engagement and learn from each other. The themes for the discussion were inspired by research on engagement in General Practices carried out in 2019. We looked at some barriers to engagement and discussed possible solutions, taking into consideration the challenge of COVID-19.

Learning session 2 (30 minutes)

You have a plan, what next? - Service Change Team (Healthcare Improvement Scotland)

The service change team provides advice and support to NHS boards and health and social care partnerships on ways to improve public involvement in service change. This session considered how to put engagement plans into practice, sharing learning and ideas to ensure that engagement is meaningful when involving people in the development or redesign of services.


Last Updated: 19 March 2021