Welcome

Dear Applicant,

Wirral PCT – Director of Engagement

Thank you for your interest in the post of Director of Engagement at Wirral PCT.

If successful you will be joining us at an exciting and critical time. We have just completed a major public engagement exercise on our draft strategic commissioning plan, which sets out our aspirations for service development over the next five years. We have been impressed by the response we have received from the public – but we recognise that there is still a huge amount to do to ensure that we realise our ambition to put patients and public involvement at the centre of all that we do.

We have big challenges –Wirral has the widest variation in terms of health outcomes for its residents of all the Merseyside PCT's. The Chief Medical Officer often quotes a difference of 9 years difference in life expectancy for a child born in Manchester and a child born in London. Our gap is 11 years for children born in wards of Wirral no more than a couple of miles apart. This poor experience of health for many of our residents stems from the fact that one third of Wirralians live in conditions of multiple social deprivation. Their experience of wealth, employment, and education is not always what we would hope for. There is a significant proportion of the population for whom worklessness has become the norm. We are now seeing third and fourth generations within families who have never worked.  Social deprivation leads to poor health. We are committed to working with partners to address poor health and the causes of poor health. The theme of tackling inequalities underpins and informs all sections of this strategy.

In addition to the extensive health inequalities, which exist in Wirral, our population is an ageing one. Predictions over the next 5 – 10 years and beyond see the number of people over 65, 75 and 85 in Wirral rising significantly while the number of young people and people of working age are set to fall. This poses significant challenges for how we organise and fund health and social care services. We need to maximise the impact of health promotion and health improvement to ensure that as many of our population as possible are aware of the causes of ill health and work with us to maintain good health.

But we also have huge opportunities. We are in a very favourable resource position. We are planning big service investments over the next five years to address the challenges identified above. But we want to make sure that the investments are targeted at the right problems and that they achieve good health outcomes Critical to this is ensuring that we link appropriately with our partners and our public. For this reason we have decided to create a brand new Director post with a remit to develop at the most senior level our work on:

  • Media management.
  • Stakeholder communications.
  • Staff involvement / engagement and communications.
  • Political engagement.
  • Public and patient involvement.
  • Social marketing.
  • Brand building / guardianship.
  • Reputation building and management

You would be joining a successful and lively team. We aspire to lead a “high performance, high reputation organisation”. But we know we still have a way to go to move from good to great. We all believe that having a Director of Engagement as a key member of our team and the Board will be hugely important in enabling us to do so. Could it be you? If you think so we will be very pleased to hear from you.

Kathy Doran
Chief Executive