How to map your stakeholders

Start by brainstorming who your stakeholders are. As part of this, think of all the people who are potentially affected by your work, who have influence or power over it, or have an interest in it. Looking at existing insights and your equalities impact assessment will also help you.

Stakeholders in your project or programme will probably include some or more of:

Internal stakeholders such as:

• Senior executives
• Wider staff groups
• Internal collegues
• Clinicians such as GPs

External stakeholders such as:

• Local people and communities including people with lived experience, their families and carers
• People from communities experiencing the greatest health inequalities
• People who might use the service in future and those who may not be using services but need to
• The wider public including residents
• Healthwatch
• Voluntary and community sector organisations, including small community led organisations and local and national charities
• Other ICB partners such as: Trusts, provider collaboratives, primary care networks, local authorities and regulators
• Clinical bodies: Royal Colleges, professional bodies, research organisations and partners
• Political: local and national Government, local Councillors, local MPs, Overview and Scrutiny Committees, Health and Wellbeing Boards, local campaign groups
• Trade Unions
• Local media
• Universities and medical schools

For service changes, you will usually need to involve people and communities with lived experience. There may also be voluntary and community organisations and political interest groups; local populations; and other services potentially impacted by a change that also need to be part of the stakeholder mapping. Some stakeholders will be easy to identify, for example, if you are making internal changes, then staff, management and Trade Unions will be key stakeholders.

Some of these may be more difficult to identify and it will be useful to get key people who are involved in the project to help list potential stakeholders. You may want to involve clinical staff and people with lived experience in this process.