Workplan
Interactive Roadshow Survey
As part of our workplan, we have designed an interactive road show survey (IRS) to find out which issues the people of Rochdale Borough feel are the highest priority.
The IRS has helped towards the forming of V4W’s work plan over the 2010/2011 years and now into 2012. V4W’s team took the IRS to various venues across the Rochdale Borough, trying to balance the age groups and diversity of the general population with the many organisations who requested their attendance at events which they were holding.
From July 2010 to May 2011 the IRS ran a broad survey regarding six Health conditions and asking six questions about Health and Social Care provisions. 1,588 people physically voted using especially created cards which they inserted into purpose built voting boxes. When asking the public where they would choose to put their money if they were the local government, ‘Heart disease’ was the health condition which received the most votes, at 987. 1,122 people choose ‘smoking’ as their lowest priority. Out of 1,479 people who were asked how satisfied they were with the provision of services, 964 voted that they were very satisfied that they were ‘treated with respect’. In the Not satisfied box ‘waiting times’ got the most amount of public votes with a total of 443.
Rochdale had become the first borough in Greater Manchester and the North West to sign up as a British Heart Foundation (BHF) Heart Town. V4W felt that because of the amount of awareness raising and initiatives already in place, for Heart Disease that they would not want to be duplicating existing BHF work.
Mental Health had come second top in the IRS voting and following on from that, V4W then held two ‘Have Your Say’ events on Dementia, one for the general community and one for the BME community.
During the initial survey, many people, when voting on Drug and Alcohol Misuse, stated very strongly that they would not put money into the subject as it was “their choice” to drink or take drugs. At this time V4W had made links with Rochdale Borough’s Youth Service and had taken the IRS to several Youth Centres so that young people could also vote. Following on from this work, V4W held their first of three ‘Have Your Say’ events on Drug and Alcohol Misuse, two of which specifically involved young people and one in the Black Minority Ethnic (BME) community.
V4W took the IRS around the Borough with a survey asking questions regarding Drug and Alcohol Misuse so as to get the opinion of the general public, backing up the ‘Have Your Say’ events. 518 people voted to say where they would choose to put their money to help improve Drug and Alcohol services. 333 people voted to put their money into ‘more involvement in schools from Drug and Alcohol services’. Out of the 499 people who were asked how confident they would feel answering specific questions, 303 voted that they could ‘say No to drinking more than the recommended limit’.
V4W are currently running a survey on Mental Health using the IRS and that will back up the ‘Have Your Say’ event on Personalisation and Mental Health being held in 2012. This event follows on from an issue which was picked up from a previous event on Personalisation. The initial ‘Have Your Say’ on Personalisation event came from previous outreach and engagement work and there is still an ongoing survey at this time.
Some reports on the above events and surveys can be found here.
The reports on the Drug and Alcohol in the BME community and at Hopwood College are in the process of being written. Finally, there will be a summary report which will pull the three events and the IRS into one package of information.
More information on this can be found by clicking here.
