Healthwatch Brighton and Hove - Annual Report 2023-24

Highlights this year

• 40 amazing volunteers contributed an estimated 4,200 hours of their time to support our work.
• 30 reports published, and 60 recommendations made to improve health and social care  - based on your feedback shared with us.
• 37 newsletters and bulletins issued and over 300 social media posts giving you information and updates about services.

We helped:

• 365 people who contacted us via our helpline.
• Overall, we engaged with 1528 people this year.

Using your stories to deliver change:

• We continued to visit people in their homes to ask them about the care they receive and their feedback was used to make improvements and appoint new providers.
• We've acted on your feedback about GPs, escalating these with those responsible for these services and securing responses. We are now working in partnership with local GPs as a result.
• We've carried out three Enter & Views of services at University Hospitals Sussex. We also conducted environmental reviews of Sussex Partnership Foundation Trust. Both Trusts have committed to actioning our findings.
• We worked with commissioners to help them select a new provider to deliver Non-Emergency Patient Transport helping secure changes to the contract based on your feedback.
• We worked with local groups to find out parents' and carers' experiences of accessing health and social care services on behalf of their children. Our findings will be included in national work led by the Care Quality Commission.
• We spoke with minoritised ethnic communities in the city about using digital services, helping to identity people to take part in future studies on ageing.
• We worked with a local drugs and alcohol service to capture young people's ideas to remove barriers to accessing support. They have produced videos and a guide for professionals.
• We collated your feedback on pharmacy services and cervical screening feeding our findings into national work being led by Healthwatch England.
• We worked in partnership with our colleagues in Healthwatch East Sussex and Healthwatch West Sussex on the transformation of outpatient services, and experiences of long COVID, dentistry, NHS complaints, Patient Advice and Liaison Services (PALS) and Memory Assessment Services .
• And much more!

We attended:

• 719 health and care meetings about health and social care services asking questions on your behalf and sharing your experiences so that those in charge understand the impacts of the decisions they make - and put the patient voice at the heart of the changes they make to health and social care.