How will we address the challenges facing health and social care?
With health and social care services facing significant challenges, we've taken stock of the role we can play to help make care better.
With the help of staff, local Healthwatch and our partners, we've looked at the steps we can take to make an even bigger difference over the next few years.
A care system facing big questions
Seventy-five years after its birth, the NHS and the social care system faces enormous challenges and big questions about how we invest in future services.
How can services:
- Tackle the care backlog and build a future service that can help people stay well and support those in need?
- Help address the deep inequalities, which see factors like where you live, ethnicity or gender result in different health outcomes?
- Work together to provide better, more joined-up, efficient care that gives more control to you?
Health and social care decision-makers can't answer these questions alone and need the public’s input. And this is where Healthwatch comes in.
The impact of health inequalities
We face unfair and avoidable differences in health between different groups in society.
- People living in the most deprived areas of England live 7.9 fewer years than those living in the least deprived areas.
- People in the most deprived areas of England are 4 times more likely to die early from cardiovascular disease.
- Mental health detentions in the most deprived areas are 3.5 times higher than the rate of detention in the least deprived areas.
Building on ten years of Healthwatch
We’ve demonstrated the power of feedback to help services understand what’s working, spot issues and think about how care can be better.
But with our health and care system facing unprecedented problems, we are committed to making an even bigger difference.
With funding in the Healthwatch under pressure and public finance likely to be constrained for the foreseeable future, it will take hard work and imagination to ensure we maximise our impact.
Using patient feedback effectively is essential to continuous improvement in the NHS with insights used to tailor services that meet people’s needs now and into the future.
After talking to staff, patients and service users and stakeholders, we believe that we need to:
- Continue to raise our profile so every community knows we are there for them.
- Focus on the big issues that most concern the public and the communities that face the worst inequalities.
- Work with the NHS at every level to find solutions and make listening to service users the default approach across all health and social care.
- Harness the resources of the Healthwatch network more efficiently and put our funding on a sustainable footing.
Our future focus
Our new plan sets out our vision, mission and aims, as well as the steps will take to help services deliver high quality health and social care for local communities.
Our aims
- To support more people who face the worst outcomes to speak up about their health and social care, and to access the advice they need.
- To support care decision-makers to act on public feedback and involve communities in decisions that affect them.
- To be a more effective organisation and build a stronger Healthwatch movement.
Want to know more?
Our strategic direction sets out our priorities and how we will achieve our ambitions.
