Working together to help improve the lives of people with dementia and their carers

During our annual conference, we came together to celebrate the work of more than 4,000 local Healthwatch volunteers and staff who help people with advice and find out the issues people face with NHS and social care so that services can improve.

Healthwatch Wiltshire won the award for working with a number of partners such as Alzheimer’s Support and Wiltshire Care Partnership* to find out how over 1600 people’s experience of living with dementia, or their carers, had been used to improve services.

Here's how Healthwatch Wiltshire made a difference.

The impact we make with partners

Using combined expertise, Healthwatch Wiltshire worked with others to:

• Reach out to a large number of community groups;
• Demonstrate how reports had been used to secure funding for specialist dementia training, resulting in a higher uptake of training by Care Managers;
• Show how training has led to improvements in care homes. These included environmental changes in care homes such as increased light and colour contrast leading to fewer falls, buffet options for some meal times and staff reporting higher levels of confidence in caring and connecting with residents;
• Update on progress made to address gaps in dementia community services. These include establishing dementia groups in areas of the county where they're needed the most and providing a greater variety of groups;
• Create a “dementia friendly” survey to ensure the voices and experiences of people living with dementia were captured.

Sharing how people have made a difference

Quite often people ask – “what happens to my feedback?”.

Healthwatch Wiltshire made sure that part of this project was to tell people how their experiences made a difference to others. To make it accessible for those affected, Healthwatch Wiltshire worked with partners to create a video explaining what they found.

What happens next?

Healthwatch Wiltshire have shared their approach to enable Healthwatch across the country to benefit from tools such as survey building with people with dementia and replication of their easy read report.

* The full list of partners includes: Alzheimer’s Support, Wiltshire Care Partnership, Wiltshire Council’s Dementia Delivery Board, Laverstock Dementia support group, Carer Support Wilshire, Age UK Wiltshire, Alzheimer’s Society, dementia friendly communities, day clubs and social groups.