Holding to account – a toolkit
The Health and Care Act gives Healthwatch the right to scrutinise the system and challenge health and care organisations to ensure they engage with local communities and meet their needs.
The introduction of Integrated Care Systems and place-based working offers a real opportunity to ensure people and communities are at the heart of health and care.
Local Healthwatch have a dual role in holding to account, both of which require building and maintaining relationships and developing effective behaviours:
- Proactive: to influence strategy and service development by bringing live experience to the table
- Reactive: to provide feedback and scrutiny on strategy or service delivery.
We want to ensure that you have the information and skills to do this effectively. As you work independently, changes to the commissioning process may affect local accountability processes differently.
About this toolkit
This toolkit aims to help you understand the local impact of developments in the system and your role in holding to account. The toolkit provides suggestions and examples for building relationships and facilitating collaboration across systems, at place and within neighbourhoods.
It covers the following:
- What accountability and holding to account stand for
- Your statutory powers
- Key areas for scrutiny of services
- Stages of holding to account
- Behaviours of holding to account
- Case studies of holding to account and various approaches from local Healthwatch
- How to map your providers and relationships with them.
Thank you to Healthwatch Surrey for producing the toolkit and to other local Healthwatch for supporting it, including Healthwatch Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Havering, Stoke-on-Trent, Southend and Thurrock.
Thank you also to Steve Inett for sharing his ‘Four Stages of holding to account Framework’.