Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the NHS10-Year Health Plan whether discussions have been held with (a) higher socio-economic groups and (b) working people.

We launched the Change NHS website to ensure that as many people as possible could have their say. As part of this, we asked participants to provide demographic information to help us hear from a representative cross-section of the public across the engagement as a whole. In tandem, we launched two nationally representative surveys, mirroring the Change NHS website content, to enable us to sense check against the insights from online participants.

At our public deliberative events, we used two channels to recruit the 755 participants to ensure the attendees were representative of the region the event was in. Firstly, two-thirds of the sample were recruited through Sortition, a method of selection designed to be representative of the population with respect to age, gender, ethnicity, location, disability, highest level of education attainment, and by index of multiple deprivation. Secondly, one third of the sample was recruited through specialist recruiters to boost audiences who are typically seldom heard in engagement. This included participants living in the 20% most deprived areas of England and those from ethnic minority backgrounds. We also held deliberative events with health and social care staff.