On this page you'll find information on, and links to:

1. The annual report template
2. Photography and icons
3. Training and support
4. Deadline information
5. Submission forms
6. Additional resources

Annual Report template

It's a legal requirement for your local Healthwatch to produce an annual report by the end of June. To help you do this, we have provided a template, which is available in PowerPoint and InDesign formats on the Communications Centre (Brandstencil).

The template uses our latest brand guidelines and includes guidance on how to complete your report, what to change, and what to include.

Please note you will need to be logged in to see the resources on the Communications Centre. There is one account per local Healthwatch. If you are having problems accessing your account, please email hub@healthwatch.co.uk.

PowerPoint Template 

InDesign Template 

Photography and icons

Images

It's great if you personalise the report with local photography. However, we are aware that many local Healthwatch struggle to source photography and do not have the budget to purchase many stock images. Check out our Flickr albums for a range of high-quality photos that are free for you to use.

View Flickr photos 

Icons

As part of our brand identity we have a collection of simple line icons. These are used in this year's template, but should you wish to change any of them you can access the full suite here. We advise using the navy icons throughout, unless there is a dark background, in which case you should use the white icons. 

Download Icon pack

Training and support

We want to help you produce the best report you can, so we have been running a series of webinars to help make the process easy and straightforward for you.

How to use the annual report template - recording

This recorded session will help you understand how to use the PowerPoint template, including changing pictures, updating text, and adding or deleting slides.

Download it here. 

How to write for your annual report

These interactive sessions will show you how you can best highlight your achievements from the last year, how to write great case studies and how to demonstrate the difference your work made. 

Tuesday 20 May | 10am - 11:30am

What is the deadline?

The deadline for your report is 30 June 2025.

Who do I send my annual report to?

Once you have published your report, you need to send it to:

• Healthwatch England (using this form)
• Care Quality Commission
• NHS England (Email England.healthwatchannualreport@nhs.net)
• Senior Integrated Care System leaders in your area
• The Overview and Scrutiny Committee of your local authority
• The local authority that commissions your service

How do I submit my report? 

To submit your report, please upload the finished document through our website form linked to below.

Upload your annual report now

Additional resources

So you've written and submitted your annual report – what next? We want to help you get the most out of your annual report content so we've put together guidance to help you do that.

What else can I do with my annual report content? 

Once you have finished your annual report, you have loads of great content on your impact over the last year. Check out our tips to make the most of your annual report content across your digital channels. 

How to make the most of your annual report content | Healthwatch Network

Videos explaining our role

1. Who are Healthwatch?

2. How sharing your healthcare experiences can help improve health and social care services

Customising animations with your own logo

If you'd like to change the logo to your local Healthwatch, please contact hub@healthwatch.co.uk and we can change the logo for you. 

This article aims to give you the guidance you need for the duration of the upcoming local elections. It covers considerations such as staff and board member involvement in elections, managing your usual engagement and publication activity and dealing with media queries.

If you are still unsure how to handle specific activities during this time, please contact the Healthwatch England policy team via policy@healthwatch.co.uk 

Where and when do local elections take place?

Local elections take place in England on 1 May 2025. Due to some areas postponing elections to allow for local government reorganisation, fewer than usual areas of England will be voting this year.

In total, elections will be held at:

• 14 county councils
• seven unitary councils
• one metropolitan borough council
• the Isle of Scilly and City of London councils.

You can check if any elections are happening in your by entering a local postcode here on the Electoral Commission website. Please be aware of whether your Healthwatch covers multiple counties or unitary authority areas. 

The pre-election period of sensitivity

This is the time from the date the local election is called (formally described as the notice of election being published), which can be no later than Tuesday 25 March 2025, until the date of the election.

During this time public authorities are limited in what they can do, to ensure that they are not seen to favour one political group or interest.

The pre-election period of sensitivity only affects your Healthwatch if there are elections within your Healthwatch boundary. However, it is important to be aware of any elections happening in neighbouring areas and to be careful that your activity does not affect them. 

Conduct of staff and board members 

Staff and/or board members may be involved in elections as supporters of political groups or as candidates. In these cases, it is important that they ensure that this is done in their own time and that they do not use any Healthwatch resources to support this activity.

Healthwatch will also need to ensure that their resources are not used in a way that might be seen as supporting any campaigning activity.

If any board members or staff are involved in canvassing, careful consideration should be given about their role in any public-facing activity during this period. You should consider whether a different person can take part in the activity or whether it can be postponed until after the election. It will be important to remind your board members and staff about your code of conduct and/or your conflict of interest policy so that they are clear about their responsibilities.

We would also urge your operational team to have a discussion with your local authority commissioner to establish if there will be any specific guidance during this period that the local authority will expect local Healthwatch to comply with, and share this with all staff and your board.

Engagement

Engaging with communities and enabling the involvement of local people in shaping services is a statutory function of local Healthwatch and can be continued during this period.

You should discuss with your board and operational team how you plan to conduct your external engagement (and communications) during this time. You  may need to adapt your approach to assure that you maintain your impartiality. Whatever work you are undertaking, it is expected that it should not draw attention away from the election, so you should be careful about how you publicise any engagement activity, even if the subject is not contentious.

During the pre-election period you should also think carefully before you launch any new consultations or publish report findings from consultation exercises, which could be politically sensitive.

Publications

During this period, you may want to publish findings of Enter and View visits, engagement work and survey findings. Material that would normally be considered objective and impartial may well be seen as political and attract attention from candidates who wish to highlight these as evidence to support their campaign. You should consider each report separately before deciding whether to publish new material.

What this pack is for

We’re running a project to learn about the public’s experiences of GP referrals for specialist treatment, and the time they spend waiting after the referral and before their specialist care starts. 

You can help us out by sharing our survey. This communications pack has some tools to help you with this.

Navigate to:

• Background and objectives
• Key messages
• Web content
• Social copy and assets
• Email copy

Background and objectives

With much-needed focus from the Government and NHS on both GP and hospital appointments, we want to understand people’s experiences during the time after being referred but before being seen by a specialist.

We carried out a similar piece of work in 2023. Two years on, we want to know how things have changed. 

This survey is aimed at any member of the public who’s had a recent referral by their GP for any kind of specialist assessment or treatment. We’re using it to gather personal stories to give context to the polling we are running around referrals.

The survey covers all conditions, but we’re especially interested in experiences of referrals for cancer, mental health conditions, and long-term conditions.

Key messages

• Our previous research on referrals found evidence of a referrals “black hole”, with people experiencing hidden waits for referrals after their GP referred them but before the referral moved forwards.
• Two years later, there are still access issues, with many referrals being formally delayed or “deferred”.
• With a much-needed focus on both GP and hospital appointments, it’s important not to forget the hidden wait between a GP making a referral and a specialist service accepting it.
• By responding to our survey, you’ll help us understand the issues people still face with the referrals process, and call for change where needed.

Square assets  Instagram post assets  Instagram story assets

About this resource

To help you plan your communications, we have created a calendar that provides you with:

• Communication opportunities (Awareness dates)
• Key Healthwatch dates
• Religious dates you might want to mark

This calendar has 12 separate tabs, one for each month. Within each tab you'll find:

1. A full month calendar view so you can see what's coming up at a glance.
2. Suggested content for the campaign / a space for you to write more information about the campaign.
3. Links of where you can go for more information about specific campaigns.

An effective communications strategy is important. It can help you engage local people, encourage them to use your service and bring to the attention of health and care services the improvements that people want.

This guide aims to help you consider the key ingredients for developing an effective communications strategy for your organisation. We have also developed a strategy template you can use locally. 

1. What do you want your communications to achieve?

It is vital to start by being clear about what you want your communications to achieve. So start by writing a purpose statement that explains how your communications will help deliver the objectives of your service.

Express your statement in plain English and try to answer the questions:

• What would success look like?
• How will our communications make sure we successfully achieve our objectives?
• What are we hoping to achieve with communications (change in attitude, greater awareness, behaviour change)?

2. Understand where you are now

Before you get into the detail, it is essential to recognise the context within which you communicate.

Be clear:

• How does your strategy links to your strategic priorities?
• What do you know about your audience?
• What have you learnt from your previous communications, and
• other factors like the external environment?

One tool for helping you assess the context is a SWOT analysis. A SWOT enables you to think about your strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats when it comes to questions like:

• The communication skills you have in-house or can purchase;
• The capacity you have available to communicate;
• The access you have to the right channels to reach your audience;
• The insight you have on what your audience thinks and feels and how they act;
• The customer experience you provide and the levels of trust people have in your service; and
• Your ability to creatively engage your audiences with your communications.

3. Identify your audiences and set your objectives

At this point, it is essential to think about who you want to engage with your communications. The more you define your audience, the better the outcomes will be, but it’s necessary also to ask:

• Why? Or in other words what’s the purpose?
• How will you do it?
• What will be the outcome?

Answering these questions can help you ensure that your objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound).

These are just example objectives, and you might have different outcomes you want to achieve, such as:

• Increasing the loyalty or frequency of people who use your service;
• New professionals seeking your advice and insight;
• Reducing the churn of volunteers; or
• More partners who advocate on your behalf.

4. Harness your insight & develop a clear proposition and message

Your detailed, audience-specific messaging will change with each campaign. Yet, at a strategic level, you need to understand your proposition for each audience and the consistent points you want to get across every-time you communicate.

Your proposition should tell your audience the value of the service you are offering or how it meets their needs.

To develop a compelling proposition (and the messages that support it), you need to understand your audience needs and interests, why they engage with Healthwatch and the barriers that might prevent them.

5. Decide how you will reach people and encourage them to act

Insight also plays a big role in deciding which channels or approaches you will invest in to deliver your strategy. Questions to consider include:

• How do people find you?
  • Using search
  • Using social media
  • Via PR in the local media
  • Via on-line and off-line partnerships with services or community groups
  • Via email or events
• Once they find you, do they have a good experience and act?
• Once they act, do they come back to you? Do they tell others about you?

It’s unlikely that you will only invest in one channel. Still, you need to understand which channels deliver you the greatest return, which channels you need to improve and the journey you want your audience to take.

6. Describing your approach

The crux of your strategy is to choose what tactics you will focus on to achieve your objectives. The tactics you choose should link back to the context and be based on audience insight. The final tactics can focus on a range of things, including:

• The channels you choose to focus on improving;
• The processes you decide to adopt; and
• The audiences, issues and content types you think you should prioritise.

The vital step is to refine them down to those that you believe will help you best achieve your objectives.

7. Develop your plan and approach

With a rapidly changing environment, we would suggest taking an agile approach to planning how you will deliver your strategy.

First, size work that is not time-sensitive but needs to happen to achieve your objectives and put this into a pipeline that follows a logical order. Taking this approach means that you can adapt to external pressures while still making progress with high priority improvements.

Secondly, plan out the number of time-sensitive communications projects you need to run.   

An agile approach is essential when it comes to delivering communications because the process helps you continually learning from each activity to help maximise the impact of the next.

One model is known as OASIS, where you follow five steps to help bring order and clarity to planning and delivering each communications project.

The five steps you need to create a campaign using OASIS are:

• Objectives
• Audience/Insight
• Strategy/Ideas
• Implementation
• Scoring/Evaluation

The idea is to use this process of constant learning to refresh your approach as you go.

8. Deciding what to measure

Do you know how your communications are working now? What things are worth measuring and why? These are questions you should consider when deciding how you will measure whether your tactics are delivering your objectives.

One way to measure your communications is to think about the journey someone takes when they use any service. First, you become aware of service. Then you think about using it. Then you do use it and, if it meets your needs, you then use it repeatedly. You might even become an advocate, telling others about it.

Other factors you should consider

This guide is not exhaustive. There will be other considerations that you might want to articulate as part of your strategy. These considerations include:

Resources:

• Who will lead on this work?
• Will delivery be in-house, or will an agency do it?
• What is the total budget required?
• Is this funding already in place?

Risks:

• What are the risks of what you are planning to do?
• Are these risks likely? And if yes, what would be the impact?
• What can we do to reduce any impact?
• What assumptions underlie this strategy and have they been tested?

Navigate the toolkit

• Campaign overview
• Objectives
• Target audiences
• Key messages
• FAQs
• Social media messaging
• Social media assets
• Email marketing

About this campaign

Campaign objectives

• Raise awareness of trans+ healthcare experiences: While some research does exist, it's not enough to fully understand the healthcare experiences of the trans+ community. Increasing visibility of the healthcare challenges trans and non-binary people face will help us build an accurate picture of the healthcare landscape they are currently navigating. 

• Amplify trans+ voices to drive change: This project will build on existing research and work by Healthwatch Lewisham to amplify the voices of trans+ people to identify areas for improvement in GP services. 

  It will give the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), NHS England (NHSE), the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and other influential stakeholders evidence on people’s experiences, helping to:

  • Influence the NHS Constitution refresh

  • Understand progress on and status of the LGBT Action Plan

  • Influence new NHS England equalities objectives

Who are we targeting?

Key messages 

• There is a lack of research on the healthcare experiences of trans and non-binary people. We want to know what barriers gender-diverse people face when trying to access care, whether general or gender-affirming. 

• GPs are often the first stop on any healthcare journey. But for trans and non-binary people, accessing GP services can be a challenge. We want to find out how GP services canbe more inclusive.

• Shaping the future of healthcare for trans+ communities must be led by their voices and lived experiences. This project aims to identify the gaps in GP services and create a healthcare system that treats every person with the respect and dignity they deserve.

Social media assets

Here are some additional resources that you can use to promote the campaign. 

A4 posters

Instagram reel/story video

Instagram carousel version 1

Instagram carousel version 2

Instagram carousel version 3

Instagram standalone story card

Don't have Canva?

You can download all the social media visuals for this campaign from Brandstencil. You must be logged in to access the assets. 

Go to Brandstencil

About

Health and care services always face the highest demand in winter. In this toolkit, you'll find resources to help you market your services, gather people's health and care experiences and give useful advice and information to the public. 

What's in the toolkit?

• An overview of our approach
• Advice and information resources
• Communication resources to help you market your service
• Links to wider winter campaigns you can support
• Advice on sharing insight and holding services to account
• How to share what you are doing locally

We'll add new resources as and when they are ready. 

An overview

NHS and social care services already face high demand. This winter, pressure on care could be even more significant, and compounded by:

• The existing backlog of care, with waiting lists for elective care at high levels
• New waves of COVID-19, flu, respiratory syncytial virus and other winter illnesses
• Cost of living pressures, with some people physically and mentally affected by cold weather because they've had to cut back on food and heating
• Ongoing collective action by some health professionals

Our focus

You can help support health and care services by:

• Using the experiences that people share with you to help services spot and address issues, and
• Providing advice that helps people stay well and use services effectively

Advice and information

We have reviewed our advice and information content and collated them for you to use on your website and communications channels.

Winter advice and information articles

Marketing your service

We have developed a marketing campaign you can use to promote your service this winter. 

This social media campaign we are planning to start on Monday 4th November 2024. You can launch your own campaigns on the same day, or after, but please don't launch before this date. 

The campaign toolkit has links to Canva assets you can download or edit with your own logo. For any Healthwatch not using Canva you can download these images from Brandstencil. 

Supporting wider NHS campaigns

As part of this year's campaign, we want to help NHS and social care services support people over the winter months. They have a number of campaigns that we'll be supporting at a national level. We encourage you to incorporate these into your winter marketing. The assets are available through the links below.

Prescription savings campaign

Cold weather communications toolkit

Winter vaccinations: 'Get vaccinated. Get Winter Strong'

Stay well this winter campaign

Sharing your insight and holding services to account

As well as quickly relaying positive and negative insight to local decision-makers, please also share your data with us to help keep national policymakers abreast of emerging issues.

Log in to our data sharing platform

You can also use the experiences that people have shared with you to scrutinise the delivery of ICS winter plans. 

About

To help you provide advice and information to the public this winter, we pulled together a collection of relevant content you can use on your website and other communications channels.

If you plan to reproduce this content rather than linking to the advice on our website, please:

• Add local information if you can. For example, provide contact details for local support. 
• Do not use images from our website. The image may be a stock image that you need a license to use. Instead, please source your own photos. 

We'll update this resource as new advice content becomes available. 

Got a content idea?

Get in touch with our communications team if you have an advice article that you think could be used by other local Healthwatch, or have an idea for new advice that could help the public this winter. 

Email the team

• The onboarding of a new website takes up to 8 weeks on average. 
• The process will involve manually transferring some of your content to our template.
• There are several deadlines you will have to meet in terms of transferring content to the new website. 
• Both your commitment and capacity to migrate the content manually, are very important.
• Please explore other Healthwatch websites that are using our template. Here are two examples: Healthwatch Cornwall and Healthwatch Ealing.
• Familiarise yourself with our template, main blocks, and taxonomies. Please ask us to give you access to our template in the form provided.
• The website will be serviced by Circle Interactive, our developers. They will charge you a one-off cost of £120 for onboarding and then £36 per month for running costs. These costs may vary slightly. 
• Healthwatch England will cover support, training and development.
• Please bear in mind, once we go live with your new website it is unlikely you will still be able to access your old website.

Information of how to complete a successful onboarding

• Focus on the content that is relevant ie. the minimum of content you would need to start this new website. This may include new content that you would have to write.
• It is as important to decide on the content you don’t need to transfer, content that is out of date for instance, or hasn’t been viewed by your users in a long while. 
• Download your reports, pictures, and multimedia files on a local drive so these can be uploaded easily to our CMS.
• Please consider keeping less relevant content on your local drives. This will give you the option to republish it after the launch if you need to. 
• It is best to start by transferring your reports and it is advisable to have these ready. Similarly, it helps to prepare the rest of the content you have in advance, for instance, the advice and information articles or events. The last you will transfer will be the pages because they require more work and familiarity with the CMS.
•  Please evaluate the number of articles you would like to transfer, in relation to how many articles to publish per week. This could give you a clear indication of the workload bearing in mind your assigned Senior Admin/Editor or team will have to manually transfer the content to our template.
• We will schedule a call and a training session with your Senior Admin/Editor or team at the beginning of the onboarding to address any issues of concern and cover the basics of publishing on our CMS.
• Support and training will be provided free and on an ongoing basis.