1st February 2023
Read more below about the Norfolk and Waveney Carers Conferences held annually since 2021.
Carers Conference 2021
The Norfolk and Waveney Hospitals Carers Conference was hosted during Carers Week 2021 by the acute hospitals as a collaborative event intended to promote the awareness and support of carers.
The theme of the national Carers Week was ‘Making Caring Visible and Valued’ and this is what the conference was planned to support. The event also served to demonstrate the ongoing collaborative working between the acute hospitals in developing better awareness and support for carers within hospitals in Norfolk and Waveney. Held virtually, via Zoom, the content of the conference was co-produced with Carers themselves.
This conference represented the first steps towards increased co-production and consistency of experience of care for patients and Carers across the three acute trusts in Norfolk and Waveney.
This built on the development of greater and closer working between these trusts and also with community, mental health trusts and voluntary sector and social care partners.
The development of the Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care System (ICS) affords an opportunity to really address the needs of carers consistently as a system.
A key commitment from all the partners is to work together to achieve this and a number of shared ambitions have been identified to take forward. One of these was ‘Co-design and working in partnership with carers and carer support organisations will be central to how we work’ and this inspired two Carer Co-production Projects.
The Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care Board approached Carers Voice Norfolk and Waveney and Caring Together to deliver two Carers Co-production Projects that focused on:
- Co-producing a Carers Identity Passport
- Carer awareness-raising for health and social care professionals.
The 2021 conference highlighted the need, so as a result the personalisation team funded a Carers co-production to design the best way to support carers, whilst their loved ones are in hospital i.e. an ID passport and more Carer awareness training.
The Carers Identity Passport was co-produced during the following year and all the work presented at the June 2022 conference. It was finally launched in November 2022 on Carers Rights Day.
Both organisations were committed to ensuring Carers voices and experiences were at the heart of the work that they did on this project.
Progress around the roll-out of the Carers Identity Passport and the Carers Awareness Training will be monitored at future conferences, as well as identifying new projects for the future.
Carers Conference 2022
The Carers Conference 2022 was focussed around four areas of health that were discussed during workshops, you can read the summaries below:
Carers Conference 2023
You can view a recording of the Carers Conference 2023 on the ICB’s YouTube page. The Question and Answer session was not recorded to help people to feel able to share and discuss. Instead a written summary of the Q&A session was produced.
All the presentations given during the conference are available below:
A more recent update on the Carers Identity Passport and the Carers Discharge Project are available in this presentation.