HIN Involvement Strategy 2026-2030
1. Introduction and background
Purpose of the strategy
This strategy sets out our refreshed approach to involvement for 2026–30, building on the foundations of our previous strategy (2022–25) and aligning with the Health Innovation Network South London’s (HIN) five year strategic direction.
Involvement is central to how we work. It helps us design better programmes, tackle health inequalities, and ensure our work reflects the needs and experiences of the people and communities we serve. Since the launch of our previous involvement strategy, we’ve made strong progress – but we know there is more we can do.
This strategy aims to:
- Refresh our approach by incorporating learning, feedback, and evolving priorities – particularly around health equity, community partnerships, and creative engagement.
- Embed involvement as business as usual, ensuring it is consistently integrated into our planning, delivery, and evaluation.
- Challenge us, exploring new and creative ways to involve people meaningfully and inclusively.
- Support people and communities, recognising that our role is not just to engage, but to empower and enable lasting impact beyond our work.
A note on language
Throughout this strategy we refer to ‘involvement’ – by this we mean any activities that engage people in HIN programmes, seeking their feedback and using their insights to inform design and delivery.
We also refer to ‘people’ and ‘communities’, recognising that our work spans individuals with lived experience, carers, families, and the wider networks and organisations that represent or support them.
These terms are used inclusively to reflect the diversity of voices we aim to involve.
Why involvement matters
NHS England’s statutory guidance on working in partnership with people and communities emphasises that effective partnership working with people and communities leads to better decisions, improved outcomes, and more sustainable services.
Involving people ensures our work is shaped by real experiences and needs, and helps us design and deliver programmes that are relevant, inclusive, and impactful.
Involvement is a core HIN strategic function — supporting programme design, priority-setting, and transformation. It reinforces the credibility and relevance of our work and helps us tackle health inequalities.
Summary of previous strategy
Our 2022-2025 HIN Involvement Strategy was co-designed with over 65 people from south London, including people with lived experience of health and care, HIN colleagues, partners, and other stakeholders. It marked a significant step in shaping how we think about and deliver involvement at the HIN and helped start a wider conversation about what meaningful involvement should look like. It laid the foundations for embedding involvement into our programmes and created space for new ways of working.
Since then, we’ve made progress on several key actions including:
- Embedding involvement across programmes and planning processes.
- Establishing Lived Experience Partner roles, helping us to ensure involvement is considered from the beginning of projects, bringing real-world insight and supporting us to engage with communities effectively.
- Developing tools and resources to support staff, such as checklists, guides, and templates.
This refreshed strategy builds on that foundation – taking what we’ve learned and challenging ourselves to ensure involvement is not only embedded, but transformative.
Watch the video: Lived Experience Partners Intro Video
Alignment with HIN’s strategic priorities
Involvement is an enabler that supports the HIN’s wider strategic priorities in the following ways:
- Enhancing programme design through co-production and real-world insights.
- Strengthening the HIN’s external offer and reputation with commissioners.
- Aligning with methodologies like value-based healthcare and experience-based co-design (EBCD).
- Supporting strategic functions like evaluation, communications, and transformation.
Involvement sits alongside mature functions within the HIN and can be offered as a service to external partners (see ‘Our offer’ below).
The table below outlines how involvement supports each of the HIN’s strategic priorities:
Previous principles
- Ensure that involving people is embedded in all our work.
HIN’s strategic priorities
- Delivering population health and care change programmes with a focus on long-term conditions, mental health and neighbourhood health.
- Supporting innovators and the health and care workforce to achieve faster adoption of innovations and drive economic growth.
- Positions the needs of people who use services as the starting point for innovation adoption.
- Evaluating the effectiveness of innovations in real-world settings and generating evidence to identify which innovations should be adopted in health and care.
- Helps evaluate innovations through real-world insights.
- Aligns closely with, and enhances, evaluation function.
- Ensuring south London benefits from national innovation priorities which address health inequalities.
- Tackles health inequalities by amplifying under-represented voices.
- Embeds the voice of people who live and work in south London in programme selection and local translation.
- Building an organisation that is sustainable, resilient, diverse and joyful.
- Recognises the rewarding and meaningful nature of high-quality involvement work.
- Builds a culture of inclusion, creativity and shared purpose.
2. Refreshed strategy
At the HIN, we have experience in using structured methodologies like design thinking, EBCD, and user research. In our 2022–25 strategy, we developed a set of values and principles to guide how we involve people and communities in our work.
As part of this strategy refresh, we’ve revisited these – drawing on feedback, learning, and evolving priorities. We have now included expectation statements alongside our principles to demonstrate how we will deliver on these.
We believe the core messages remain relevant but have adapted and expanded them to reflect our growing ambition, our commitment to equity, and our desire to work in more creative and sustainable ways.
The first part of our strategy will be exploring how our staff can be explicit about the use of the values, principles and expectations with internal stakeholders and people with lived experience in our work.
Values
Our Involvement values closely align to the HIN’s values:
- Brave: We encourage and support our colleagues to be open and willing to change as a result of involving people.
- Kind: We care about our communities and want people to have a positive experience when they work with us.
- Together: Our core belief is that we can close the health inequalities gap by including diverse communities in the design and development of innovations.
- Different: We find strength in our differences and are committed to involving people with a multitude of perspectives so that we can identify areas to improve and try new things.
- Open: We’re open about what we do, and we continuously share what we learn with those who have been involved and helped us to make a difference.
Principles and Expectations
1. Embed involvement in everything we do
- Previous principle: Ensure that involving people is embedded in all our work.
- Refreshed principle: Ensure that involving people is considered as part of every project and programme from the start and consistently integrated across all areas of work.
- Expectation: Involvement is never an afterthought but a method of delivering high-quality, impactful projects, therefore teams will always consider involvement during proposals and project set up (even if the decision ends up concluding no involvement is appropriate).
2. Put equity, inclusion, and lived experience at the heart of our work
- Previous principle: Ensure that involving people is embedded in all our work.
- Refreshed Principle: Actively reflect a wide range of lived experiences in our work and prioritise inclusion and equity in how we design and deliver involvement.
- Expectation: Involvement is never an afterthought but a method of delivering high-quality, impactful projects, therefore teams will always consider involvement during proposals and project set up (even if the decision ends up concluding no involvement is appropriate).
3. Empower people and communities and amplify their influence
- Previous principle: Extend the profile and influence of people’s voices in the decisions we make as an organisation.
- Refreshed Principle: Support people to shape decisions and direction, and ensure their voices are heard, valued and acted on.
- Expectation: People and communities are involved in shaping decisions, not merely consulted. To enable this, teams consider the following:
- During project initiation, identifying opportunities for people in decision-making and co-design.
- Consider designing at least one opportunity per project for people to meaningfully shape direction — such as co-developing priorities, reviewing outputs, or influencing implementation plans.
- Demonstrating how lived experience input has influenced decisions by visibly referencing it in outputs.
- feeding back after engagement, outlining how input was used and the difference it made.
4. Build lasting and reciprocal partnerships
- Previous principle: Build on our local connections and inspire more organisations and people to partner with us in our work.
- Refreshed Principle: Build on our local connections and inspire more organisations and people to partner with us, enhancing knowledge exchange and creating mutual opportunities for learning and growth.
- Expectation: Teams build and maintain relationships with community organisations, leaders, and networks as equal partners. To achieve this, teams consider the following:
- Identifying relevant community partners during project scoping and, where appropriate, engage them in shaping priorities and approaches.
- Sharing resources, learning, and decision-making power to support mutual benefit and capacity-building.
- Maintaining dialogue with partners beyond the project lifecycle, with at least one follow-up or knowledge exchange activity after project completion.
5. Show impact and share learning
- Previous principle: Demonstrate where involving people has made a positive difference.
- Refreshed Principle: Demonstrate where involvement has made a difference and share what we’ve learned to support others to embed involvement.
- Expectation: Teams capture and communicate the difference involvement has made — to decisions, outcomes, and patients. Learning is shared internally, externally and with those who have contributed, including what didn’t work, to support continuous improvement and sector-wide progress.
6. New principle: Champion creative engagement
- Refreshed Principle: Broaden our approach to involvement by using creative methods to engage with communities who might prefer these to traditional formats, and to share our work in ways that are more inclusive and impactful to the communities we work with.
- Expectation: Teams explore and use creative methods (such as visual arts, performance, storytelling, and digital media) to make involvement more accessible, inclusive, and engaging. Creative approaches are used to reach new audiences, surface deeper insights, and celebrate peoples’ voices in meaningful ways. By building in evaluation of creative methodologies, our work will contribute to the evidence base surrounding these approaches.
Our offer
We bring a distinctive and principled approach to involvement, grounded in experience and a commitment to meaningful engagement. Our offer includes:
- Principled and purposeful
We work with integrity and transparency, ensuring that involvement is purposeful, inclusive, and aligned with best practice. Our focus is on creating value for both organisations and the communities they serve with an approach rooted in equity and inclusion, amplifying voices that are often underrepresented. - A critical friend
We provide constructive challenge and act as a trusted partner – providing honest feedback, asking the right questions, and holding systems to account. This ensures that involvement is not just a process but a driver of improvement and innovation. - Expertise in partnership working
We are skilled in building and sustaining partnership approaches that work across organisational and system boundaries. Our experience spans health, care, research, and community settings, enabling us to navigate complexity and foster collaboration.
- Flexible and adaptive
We tailor our approach to meet the needs of each project or organisation. Whether it’s co-designing a new service, supporting governance structures, or embedding lived experience roles, we adapt to context and priorities. Our adaptable approach ensures relevance and impact in diverse contexts.
Some examples of our work include:
- Coordinating the Citizens Advisory Group for London’s Secure Data Environment Programme – we established and facilitated a group that brought public voices into a highly technical programme, ensuring transparency and trust in data use.
- Lived Experience Partners – we have experience in recruiting, supporting, and integrating lived experience partners into organisational structures. We can advise on how to develop this role in your organisation, ensuring it is meaningful and sustainable.
Get in touch
If you’re interested in involvement or would like support with involving people and communities in your health or care project, our team would love to hear from you.
Whether you’re looking to co design a service, embed lived experience into a programme, or strengthen involvement across your organisation, we can help.
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