About

Volunteers' Week celebrates the amazing contributions volunteers make to communities across the UK.  

We want to dedicate the week to celebrate all of our local Healthwatch volunteers. We want to focus on long-term volunteers who have volunteered with us for longer than five years, but we will also celebrate the rest of our volunteers.  

Each day we will focus on a different area of how volunteers make a difference and how volunteering can help you.  

Resources

Video 

We want to help you get the most out of your marketing and make an impact on your audiences. We've put together some helpful templates you can localise and adapt for your traditional or, digital marketing activities. 

1. Print templates
2. Social media templates
3. Email marketing 

Print and publication resources

• NEW Business card template
• A2/A3 light blue poster template
• A4 "About us" leaflet (dark blue)
• A5 "About us" flyer (for the public)
• A5 "About us" flyer (for professionals)
• Postcard template
• A4 poster templates
• Communications strategy template
• Healthwatch values pledge cards
• Healthwatch values poster

Social media templates

4:5

• Quote card
• Text card
• Image card (image top and bottom)
• Stat card
• Carousel - advice and info
• Carousel - news and reports

1:1

• Quote card
• Text card
• Image card (image top and bottom)
• Stat card

9:16

• Text card
• Quote card
• Image card (image top and bottom)

16:9

• Text card
• Quote card
• Image card (right curve)
• Image card (left curve)
• Recruitment card

Email Marketing

• Email headers

You told us that you would find it helpful if we grouped our learning and development offer into pathways linked to key Healthwatch roles and responsibilities.

There are some core activities that all local Healthwatch must do.  These will be carried out by different people in each local Healthwatch, so we have focused on activities rather than job titles.  We have a range of training, peer networks, guidance, and e-learning courses to help you develop your skills and build your confidence in these areas.  The activities are: 

• Welcome to Healthwatch 
• Providing information and advice to the public 
• Gathering views from the public 
• Making views known and using them to improve services 
• Reaching people and communicating the difference we make  
• Managing volunteers 
• Running a Healthwatch  

How to use the framework 

There is a page for each core activity with the keys skills you need to carry them out and the learning opportunities that will help you. New members of staff or volunteers may want to complete the whole pathway, more experienced people may just want to plug gaps in their learning.  

Everyone learns differently so we have colour coded the different learning opportunities so you can choose which suits you best. Where there are several learning opportunities next to a skill, you can choose which suits you best and do as many as you wish.  The links will take you straight to the session to book, the e-learning course or the resource to download.   

From left to right you will see webinars, e-learning courses, peer network meetings, guidance documents then bespoke support.  This is not in any priority order, just for ease of reading.  

About this resource 

We have created a learning and development calendar for the year ahead so you can see what training opportunities from us you will have throughout the year.  

We have designed this plan based on your feedback and the Healthwatch core skills framework. 

Events are now available to book through our training and events section. Please always remember to let us know if you can no longer a session that you book in advance, so we can offer the place to someone else.  

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?