Reflecting on the impact of your annual reports: How you are making a difference
This year, my team and I thoroughly enjoyed reading through your annual reports. It’s such a rewarding and motivating experience to see the difference you're making for communities across England. From influencing local plans and strategies to ensuring public communications are accessible and understandable, revising service delivery for better effectiveness, and facilitating people’s involvement in service design—you’re making a tangible impact. It’s clear how much your work means for the experience and health outcomes of local people.
There’s a strong consensus across the Healthwatch network that demonstrating impact is essential to maintaining support and securing funding. This priority has been reinforced in our conversations with local authority commissioners and other key stakeholders—demonstrating outcomes is a clear expectation we've incorporated into the new template contract specification we are developing at their request. Highlighting impact is also vital for making the case for Healthwatch’s future sustainability and growth. That’s why we’ve made impact a core service value and placed greater emphasis on outcomes in our updated annual report template.
Next steps
At Healthwatch England, we’re tasked with forming an opinion on the effectiveness of local services. The outcomes achieved by each local Healthwatch are key proxy indicators that inform our reporting on the State of the Network – the picture of the effectiveness of Healthwatch. We look forward to showcasing examples of Healthwatch outcomes across health and care, particularly those addressing inequalities, including our forthcoming National Awards 2024.
In just two years, there’s been a remarkable shift towards outcomes-focused reporting. In 2021/22, only 40% of annual reports demonstrated a good level of outcomes reporting. This year, we saw that figure rise to 80%! The progress over the past year alone is impressive: between the 2022/23 and 2023/24 reports, a third of the network significantly increased their focus on outcomes reporting, with another third showing a marked improvement.
Moreover, the majority of annual reports that communicated outcomes highlighted changes with a clear impact on reducing health inequalities—a tremendous shift in focus that the network has achieved in a few short years.
There’s still a little way to go for some Healthwatch to communicate achievements as effectively as the front-runners. However, we’re confident that in most cases, it’s a matter of following up on completed work or refining how the story is told about what’s achieved for local residents.
For the Healthwatch that may be struggling with outcomes reporting, we understand there can be various challenges. It might also be that we’re not fully capturing the real picture from the annual reports alone. That’s why we’ll be reaching out to better understand your experiences locally and explore how we can provide further support.
We hope you too have noticed the positive impact that refining your approach to communicating outcomes has had on local support and engagement. We’re committed to helping Healthwatch improve individually and as a network, and have developed a suite of resources to support the network, all accessible from one page on the network site: Impact Resources. This includes early work to set out the domains of outcomes – not just service improvements, but all the areas where Healthwatch can achieve impact such as helping shape strategies and plans and facilitating effective co-creation.
Thank you for your ongoing dedication and for sharing the incredible work you do. It’s inspiring to see the progress made and the growing focus on outcomes that truly make a difference for local communities. Together, we are building a stronger, more impactful Healthwatch network.