Healthwatch Brighton and Hove December update

Maternity

Healthwatch Brighton and Hove is running a project speaking to a small number of parents who have experienced mental health challenges during and after giving birth, to learn more about how this has affected them. The project is led by our Project Coordinator Michelle Kay. The project is timely as concerns have been raised nationally around maternity services. Locally, the Care Quality Commission issued a report in July which identified patient safety concerns at our local Trust (University Hospitals Sussex). Since then, the Trust has implemented a number of positive changes including recruiting more midwives.

GP survey

We recently closed our Sussex-wide survey in which we asked for views about remote appointments. We ran a similar survey in 2020 and it will be fascinating to see how your views have changed. Our Head of Research, Dr Lester Coleman is leading this and we will publish results shortly.

Dementia pathway project

We were successful in securing funding to deliver a project which will involve speaking to dementia patients and their families/carers. We will be examining how referrals to memory services/other routes to diagnosis work; experience of memory assessment services; experience of post diagnostic support, and more. We hope to publish outcomes by early Spring 2023.

Homecare checks

We have reinstated our project, which sees us working with Brighton and Hove City Council, to speak to people who receive care at home and what their experiences have been. Project Coordinator Will Anjos and Project officer Clary Collicutt are leading this work with a dedicated team of volunteers who are making visits and calls to people.  This will be an ongoing project and we will publish regular (anonymised) findings.

Direct Payments

We are working with the Council to explore people’s experiences of receiving (including applying for) direct payments, and recommendations towards how the process could be improved. These payments support people to get help from social services but lets them choose and buy the services they need, instead of getting them from the council.

In other work, we continue to discuss the retendering of Non-Emergency Patient Transport Services across Sussex with Commissioners to ensure that our earlier work gathering public opinion is not lost. We also continue to work on finding ways to improve access to dentistry with colleagues across Sussex and will be actively monitoring whether recent changes will deliver improvements for patients.

On other news

Our local NHS Trust received a report from the Care quality Commission expressing concerns over patient safety within upper gastrointestinal services. Since the CQC made their unannounced visit in August this year, the Trust has acted on the findings, but the unit remains closed meaning that patients are travelling further afield for surgery. We issued a press release calling on the Trust to ensure the unit can open as soon as possible.

Data continues to show the pressures facing the NHS.

The latest figures for elective care showed an increase in the number of people on the waiting list, up to 7.2million. It is however a mixed picture, and while fewer people are waiting over 18 months for appointments, the average time it takes most people to get care continues to be very high. Read the response from Healthwatch England to the latest data. Locally, a number of initiatives are happening to address waiting lists including contacting people who have been waiting to ensure they still need to be seen and chasing people to reduce the number of people who do not attend appointments – which averages around 4000 per month.

Data on Emergency Departments shows record numbers faced four-hour A&E waits in England in October. The average response times for ambulances also rose again across much of the country. Interestingly, a report by The Patient Experience Library looking at why people use Emergency Departments which revealed that people are confused about the difference between A&E and walk-in centres, minor injuries units and urgent treatment centres.  A key driver of attendance at A&E is the difficulty of getting appointments or advice from GPs and NHS 111 and some evidence suggests that GP referrals to A&E might not always be appropriate. And patients enduring long waits in A&E seem less concerned about adherence to the four-hour target (if they are even aware of it) than about unpleasant experiences in waiting areas.

New data on GP practices was published. The data is new and should be treated with some caution as it is new and innovative but it showed that in October in 984,232 appointments took place within GP practices in Sussex (in Brighton and Hove 149,886). This is a record number of appointments. Nearly 70% of appointments in October were face to face, with 26% by phone. GP access continues to be topical and it is therefore interesting to read that 5% of appointments involved patients not attending. The reasons why are not clear, but 40,000 lost appointments is too many. Finding ways to make it easier to change, or cancel appointments are needed. Our local health care system has been identifying ways to improve access to primary care this winter such as providing weekend and evening appointments, additional workforce, and providing  community pharmacy consultations. Read more about what this means here