How will we improve our support for you?

Network News - 13 April 2023

Each year, we ask you what you think of our training and guidance and what more we can do to help you do your job. Find out what you told us.

At the start of this year, we asked you to tell us what you think about the support we provide to you and your learning needs over the year ahead.

How satisfied are you?

Thanks to the 376 of you who responded to our questions, including officers, managers, board members and over 50% of lead officers.

Overall, six in ten of you felt our support was good or very good, with three per cent of people rating our support as poor.

When it came to whether our support was getting better:

29% said support was improving,
36% said it had remained the same,
1% said it has worsened, and
23% said you were too new to Healthwatch to comment.

What's improved? What could be better?

You told us that your interactions with our staff improved, as did our training, guidance and webinars. You also liked our timelier communications and updates.

However, we also feedback on areas you'd like to improve. These included making it easier to find resources, more notice on the asks we make of you and more help for new starters. You also said you'd like more opportunities to network, get peer support, and help improve your advice and information service.

What did you say about your learning needs?

We had lots of helpful insight from our survey and the conversations we've been holding about our support over the next year.

What do you want to focus on?

You asked for more help to assist you in building the skills you need in specific Healthwatch roles and activities.

How would you like to learn?

You asked for more small group sessions, e-learning courses and opportunities to network. You also asked us to build on our peer networks. These networks include groups for lead officers, board members, volunteer managers, engagement leads, researchers, campaign ambassadors, and equality, diversity, equity, and inclusion leads.

What topics do you want help with?

Over 60% of you said you wanted to build your skills when it came to:

Describing our outcomes and impact
Understanding health and social care
Reaching seldom-heard communities
Holding services to account, and
Understanding your statutory obligations

And the result

We've launched our Core Skills Framework. The framework aims to help you understand the core skills you need in your role and what support, whether training or guidance, is available to help you.

Check out the framework

We've also published our training calendar for the year, so you can see when we'll be providing training relevant to you.

View the calendar

Next steps

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and helped shape our training offer this year. A special shout-out to Healthwatch staff in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, East Sussex, Kent and Medway and West Sussex, who helped develop our core skills framework.

But we're not stopping there. As part of our strategy refresh, we'll use your feedback to look at various areas, including how we communicate and collaborate, making our funding more sustainable and strengthening our advice and information service.

Have you got an idea, question or suggestion?

Just contact a member of the Network Development Team.