Healthwatch Brighton and Hove - Annual Report 2020

Highlights from our year

Providing support: 

• 1,598 people shared their health and social care story with us, 220% more than last year.
• 16 services reviewed including home care, community health and social care, hospital wards, outpatient areas and clinics, and services for young people.

Health and care that works for you

• 67 volunteers - including 25 Young Healthwatch volunteers - played a crucial role in supporting Healthwatch Brighton and Hove, contributing 5,405 hours of their personal time.
• They were supported by 5 paid staff made up of 2 full time and 3 part-time employees.

Reaching out

• 21,420 people visited our website including 10,076 new users, an increase of 8% on last year.
• We also reached 26,370 people via our Facebook posts, and 33,663 via Twitter.
• 1,484 people receive our regular news mailshots including our COVID-19 updates.

Making a difference to care

• 10 reports produced during the year on issues that matter to you. These included a GP Practice Review, Oral Health, Home Care, Hospital Complaints, Hospital PLACE and Environmental Audits, BAME Sexual Health & young BAME people, and COVID-19 bulletins.
• Our volunteer representatives attended 212 meetings where health and social care decisions were made, to help keep you informed and to represent your voice.

Plans for next year

Priorities

Helping local people get through COVID-19 by providing information, signposting to services, and raising issues based on people’s experiences of health and care services

•  Helping the NHS and local care services to be restored and to recover from the impact of the virus.
• Learn lessons from how services have changed over recent months - there may be opportunities to do things a better way.
• Challenge leaders and decision makers on issues where the public and patient voice is not being heard.
• Listen to voluntary and community organisations in the city when we decide what work Healthwatch will be doing over the next year.
• Build on the strength our volunteers have to reach people whose voices are not heard.

Plans

Our plans for next year will include recovering from the virus crisis and restoring some of the projects we suspended temporarily:

• Continue with new projects started during the virus period, including more webinars on issues of topical interest.
• Escalating issues to the NHS, Council, Regulators like CQC and Healthwatch England.
• Supporting and signposting people after hospital discharge and in care homes. • Connecting mental health NHS, community and voluntary care. Focus on Young People.
• Restore and improve projects we suspended temporarily - hospital environmental and home care quality and safety reviews.
• Help health and social care services to redesign services in line with the expectations and preferences of local people.
• Help experts in Public Health and decision makers to tackle health inequalities in health and social care.
• Why do we have dozens of complex systems for making suggestions about improving services and making complaints - why not one simple route open to all?