Our Winner: Healthwatch Coventry
Healthwatch Coventry won the 2024 award, for improving maternity care of refugee and women new to the UK.
After discovering that many pregnant refugees and asylum seekers were not receiving adequate antenatal support they worked with the NHS and maternity services to make it easier for these women to access essential maternity care.
Highly commended: Healthwatch Blackpool
Our 2024 runners up carried out a project helping to identify and tackle a rise in vaping amongst children and young people.
Commended Healthwatch
Due to the outstanding level of entries this year, our panel of judges also commended the following Healthwatch for their work:
- Healthwatch Birmingham for their work to (a) improve maternity care for people from Black African and Black Caribbean backgrounds and (b) making sure that people from ethnic minority communities have a greater role in designing health and care services that meet their unique needs.
- Healthwatch Cambridgeshire and Healthwatch Peterborough for delivering a Gypsy, Roma, Traveller cultural awareness programme for Integrated Care System colleagues, to tackle the health inequalities experienced by these communities.
- Healthwatch Croydon for helping Black African and Black Caribbean communities co-design new mental health and wellbeing services in line with their specific views and experiences.
- Healthwatch Essex for developing a new tool to help trauma survivors when traumatic memories are triggered.
- Healthwatch Gloucestershire for getting the NHS to improve the mental health support available in emergency departments.
- Healthwatch Herefordshire for improving people’s access to digital healthcare and support.
- Healthwatch Hertfordshire for identifying the impact of the cost of living on people's health and getting more support provided.
- Healthwatch Kent for improving access to health and care information for people with sensory impairments and learning disabilities.
- Healthwatch Kirklees for launching the ‘carers lanyard’, ensuring that carers are immediately identifiable in health and care settings.
- Healthwatch Leeds for working with local partners on the rollout of an improved citywide model of home care.
- Healthwatch Milton Keynes for ensuring that more deaf patients in Milton Keynes get their legal right to accessible health and social care information and communications support if they need it.
- Healthwatch North Somerset for improving access to online health services for digitally excluded people.
- Healthwatch Suffolk for using the experiences of over 50,000 children and young people to shape mental health support in schools, colleges and the NHS.
- Healthwatch Surrey for making it easier for people with learning disabilities to access cancer screening services.
- Healthwatch Torbay for helping to improve care and support for local patients in their own home.