What do we mean by accessibility? 

Accessibility means ensuring everyone can access your information, providing equal access and opportunities to people with diverse abilities.

The content you produce and upload must meet high standards to ensure you provide information that everyone can benefit from.   

The accessibility guide covers

• New Web Content Accessibility rules, introduced in September 2023
• How to provide accessible images, multimedia content and downloads
• Event accessibility considerations

Accessibility policy template

Our template provides you with a suggested structure for the policy you should display on your website. 

This policy covers:

• Digital accessibility
• Online events
• Face-to-face events

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.  

Resizing pictures with Canva

More Healthwatch are adding Canva to their creative toolkit to enhance their marketing output. The platform is free. All you need is an account. Here's a quick guide to using the platform to edit your images: 

• From the top menu select Create  → Photo editor
• You'll come to a workspace. In the top bar, you want to select Open  → Computer (or wherever the image you want to edit is saved.)
• In the left-hand panel, you, will see multiple photo editing options, including Crop and Resize. Select the option you want and adjust your image accordingly depending on your needs. 
• In the top bar you'll have the option to Save your work in a destination of your choice.  
• You can name your file, and hit Save. This will automatically download your altered image to your chosen save destination - saving to your computer is the easiest option. 

Resizing pictures with BeFunky

BeFunky is a free image editing platform that allows you to crop and resize images. It is free to use and you don't need an account. Here's a quick guide to using the platform to edit your images: 

• From the homepage , select Resize & Magic Switch, and look at the Resize section.
• You can choose from common design sizes, browse by category and choose multiple sizes.
• To use your own measurements, select Custom size. 
• Select Continue, and choose how you want to resize. 

For more help mastering Canva, check out their Design Academy. It's full of useful tutorials. 

Microsoft Office Picture Manager and Microsoft Paint, both of which are free and may already installed on your PC by default.

Resizing pictures with Microsoft Paint

Microsoft Paint is a very basic picture editing program, so it has quite limited functionality. However, it does provide a simple and quick way of resizing images.

• Open Paint – Start → Programmes → Accessories → Paint
• Open the file you want to edit
• Click Resize
• This will bring up the Resize and Skew pop-up.
• Select the pixels option
• Untick maintain aspect ratio and put in the dimensions you need and click ‘Ok’

If doing this has distorted your image, then you will need to click undo and crop your image first. For example, if you have an image that is 246 x 246 pixels and you want it to be 200 x 74 pixels simply resizing it will distort the image.

Resizing pictures for social media

Landscape by Sprout Social is a free online tool that helps you resize, crop and scale images ready for use across multiple social media platforms.

Use this cheat sheet to to see all of the correct dimensions for pictures across the different channels. 

Don't forget

You will need to get consent from people that you take pictures of at events. Use our consent form.

Resizing pictures with Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Picture Manager is slightly more advanced than Microsoft Paint and has a few additional functions for editing pictures.

• Find the picture you want to edit in your documents, right click and then go to Open with and select Microsoft Office.
• To resize images, go to Picture → Resize

Using the ‘Percentage of original width x height’ option in the right-hand menu, use the arrows to decrease the size. The ‘original size’ is the size the image was when you opened it and the ‘new size’ is the size that you’re changing it too. The ‘new size’ will change as you decrease the percentage.

Cropping images

If you need to crop the image go to Picture → Crop

Here you can either drag the corners of the image, or use the arrows in the right hand menu to trim your image down to a more precise size.

About this resource

The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) is a process by which local authorities and integrated care systems assess the current and future health, care and wellbeing needs of the local community to inform local decision making.

JSNAs make sure that health organisations and local authorities have a good understanding of their local populations, and the challenges services face in tackling health inequalities.

Many local Healthwatch regularly influence their local JSNA to share vital information about what people want from services. This resource aims to provide you with more information about how you can engage effectively with yours. It includes:

• More about what a JSNA is and how they work
• Case studies where Healthwatch across the country have worked effectively with their JSNA
• Opportunities for Healthwatch to get involved in their local JSNA
• How you can use JSNA to prioritise your future work and hold local systems to account on what they're doing

About this resource

The National Reports Library is a repository of local Healthwatch and Healthwatch England reports on our website. To help you use it effectively, this guide covers: 

• What the National Reports Library is 
• How to create your account 
• How to upload a report
• Important next steps
• Themes taxonomy options and its use 

This guide consists of: 

1. A PDF of the main guide 
2. A Word document of a checklist to use alongside the guide 
3. A video demonstrating how reports are uploaded 

About this resource

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

• Communication opportunities
• 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.

Background

Our new report, “The public's perspective: The state of health and social care" draws on 65,000 people's experiences of health and care services shared with Healthwatch in the last year. 

The report outlines the public's top concerns about healthcare, including access to GP services, NHS dentistry, mental health services, and cancer care, among others. 

It points to where improvements are needed while highlighting the key issues facing the NHS today: 

• access to health and care services remains the most significant challenge people report to us across the country; 

• access issues continue to widen health inequalities.

In order to further explore health inequalities, we commissioned a poll looking at the use of private care today.  

Goal:

With this piece of work, we want to highlight where inequalities of care are being exacerbated and offer solutions to healthcare leaders on how we can address the inequalities in access and quality of care.

This pack includes: 

• How you can support it
• Target audiences 
• Campaign phases 
• Links to products 
• Suggested social media messages 
• Social media assets 
• Template letter to stakeholders 

How you can support it

This new research draws on the experiences of thousands of people from across the country. We hope you will find it relevant and helpful in supporting your own work in the year to come. Below are some of the things you can do to support it: 

• Share the below suggested social media posts and other content on your social media channels, and other digital media channels. 
• Use the below template letter and write to your partners to highlight the important role of access to healthcare for everyone.
• Use relevant findings when talking to your stakeholders and the media.

Target audiences

Professional audiences

• MPs
• healthcare leaders eg. ICS
• NHS trusts
• Local authorities
• Local charities and organisations

Local media

Health and social care users, carers, families. 

Campaign phases

Phase 1

Monday 27 November: we kick off the launch with a story in The Observer based on our poll into people’s use of private care while highlighting issues with access to NHS services. This will be supported by communications to key stakeholders and across social media.

Phase 2 

From Tuesday 28 November: we focus our external comms on the key issues highlighted in the report.  We also expect an opinion piece in a trade title.  

Products 

These will go live on Monday 27 Nov morning.

Report: The public’s perspective: The state of health and social care | Healthwatch

Blog: Faster progress needed to tackle barriers to care | Healthwatch

Suggested social media posts 

Suggested hashtags: 

#PublicViews

#StateOfHealthcare 

#HealthInequalities 

For the launch story on Monday 

1. Amid ongoing pressures in the NHS, @HeathwatchE warns of a two-tier system where access to care is often available to those with money to pay for it. Read their new research.

2. The majority of society, especially those on lower incomes, disabled people, carers and younger people, face real-time challenges accessing care.  We join @HealthwatchE in calling for faster progress to tackle growing health inequalities. 

3. With ongoing pressures in the NHS, access to healthcare is not equal today. New research by @HealthwatchE warns of deepening health inequalities and calls for faster progress with NHS recovery plans. 

Sharing your feedback and signposting data with us

We're asking you to share your feedback and signposting data with us via our new secure data-sharing platform. This lets you map your data categories to the standard taxonomy and save your settings for future use.

The data-sharing platform will upload your data to the National Data Store, which our research team uses for national analysis.

Why you should share your data with us

Sharing your data with us is a legal requirement.

We rely on local Healthwatch insight to understand trends in how people experience health and social care services. For us to be an effective champion we need to be able to hear from all communities across the country.

Building links with under-represented groups and attending engagement events lets Healthwatch collect rich data, which makes our insight unique and valued by policymakers and service providers.

Over half of all Healthwatch are now using the platform to share data with us – many more than used to use the CiviCRM.  We’ve had lots of positive feedback about the ease of using the system.

What you need to know before sharing data with us

You’ll need to have ready a .csv file (in .csv-UTF-8 format) of your usual feedback and signposting data. We can help you convert it to the correct format. Your file must include the following fields:

• The date you collected the feedback or signposting data
• The actual feedback itself
• The type of services the feedback is about (e.g. GP, dentist, etc.)

We’d also like you to share the following fields (if you collect this information):

• The sentiment of the data
• The title or summary of the feedback
• The themes of the feedback (e.g. access to services, quality of care etc)
• Demographic information on age, gender, ethnicity, disability and long-term condition

There are other fields you can share with us – check out the complete list of fields.

Watch the video above to see how the data sharing platform works.

What's next for you?

We're contacting all Healthwatch to arrange a session to learn how to use the platform.

We’ll also ask you to sign a data sharing agreement. This has been developed on the advice of data protection experts and in line with guidance from the Information Commissioners Office, for any system or process involving data sharing between Healthwatch and Healthwatch England.

The agreement sets out our roles and standards of what is expected from the arrangement and each party, with a schedule for each system.

If you have any questions about the data sharing platform, please contact datasharing@healthwatch.co.uk.

All Healthwatch can carry out Enter and View visits and need Authorised Representatives to do this. You told us that you would like help to train your volunteers and staff to become Authorised Representatives.

Thank you to Healthwatch Redbridge, who have produced this training pack, which you are welcome to use. Healthwatch Redbridge have a wealth of experience in delivering Enter and View and in training Authorised Representatives.  They pride themselves on their accessibility so you will find all these resources are highly accessible for all the volunteers and staff you will want to train.  

What does the training resource include? 

The pack includes slides, handouts, case studies and comprehensive session plans for both online and classroom-based sessions.

There are step by step instructions to help you, and we recommend that you go through the slides and session plans to familiarise yourself with the content before starting your training.

You can adapt and edit all the resources to meet your own needs.