This session will introduce you to the Health and Care system at both local and national levels and what it means for you working at Healthwatch.
Webinar for a large audience with Q&A
If you have any particular questions, you can send them in advance to policy@healthwatch.co.uk
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 also includes guidance on how to complete your report, what to change and what you need to include in your report.
Please note you will need to be logged in to see the resources on The Communications Centre. There is one account per local Healthwatch, however if you are having problems accessing your account please email hub@healthwatch.co.uk
It's great if you can personalise the report with local photography. However, we are aware a lot of local Healthwatch struggle to source photography and do not have the budget to purchase a lot of stock images. Check out our Flickr albums for a range of high quality photos that are free for you to use.
We want to help you produce the best report you can, so we are running a series of webinars to help make the process as easy and straightforward for you.
This session will help you to understand how to use the PowerPoint template, from changing pictures, updating text and adding or deleting slides.
10 April | 10am - 11.30am
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. These training sessions will be repeated twice as numbers are limited.
22 April | 10.30am - 12noon
16 May | 2.30pm - 4pm
Once you have published your report, you need to send it to:
The deadline for your report is 30 June 2024.
Due to the election on 4 July 2024, this year we recommend that:
We recommend you get in touch with your local authority commissioners ahead of the deadline to inform them of your approach and let them know the annual report publication will be delayed due to the pre-election guidance and when they can expect to receive it from you.
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 the this content across your digital channels.
To submit your report, please upload the finished document through our website form linked to below.
'The Healthwatch Network: A National Picture of Key Trends' highlights that while impact and income generation have increased and many more Healthwatch are sharing data, variation means it's hard to compare activity levels and core funding has experienced a real-terms cut.
In the report, we also consolidate key information we collect from the Healthwatch network to look at key areas including:
We highlight some of the diverse outcomes Healthwatch across the country have achieved, including making services more accessible, helping to expose safety concerns and improving access to dental appointments.
We also use the report to explain what we are doing, and what more you as the Healthwatch network could be doing, to further help each other and the communities we serve.
Last year, Healthwatch received nearly 400,000 experiences of health and social care. This valuable feedback helps us identify where and how services can improve.
But not everyone's voice is being heard.
Our new campaign, Share for Better Care, focuses on engaging with communities who are underrepresented in our national feedback and encourages them to share their experiences of NHS and adult social care.
#ShareForBetterCare is a joint campaign with the Care Quality Commission and is being run in collaboration with the Race Equality Foundation, National Dignity Council and Royal Association for Deaf.
Our campaign, which runs until April 2025, will focus on collecting experiences of people from minority ethnic backgrounds and people from lower-income groups.
The campaign has been designed so you can use it to:
We want people to know that their feedback, no matter how small, has the power to transform health and social care across the country.
We also want you to encourage your local NHS and social care services to adopt the campaign so that together, we can increase awareness and feedback to help improve services.
The campaign will run from February 2024-April 2025 and will be made up of four distinct phases:
You can personalise our campaign materials to support your communications locally. Editable digital templates are available for download below.
We'll add more resources to these collections as they become available throughout the campaign.
Download images to use in your communications from our Flickr library.
Use and tweak our social messages for your own channels. You can encourage people to share their experiences via our national feedback form or your own survey.
We've written content that you can use or tailor for your website and email marketing.
This content includes email copy for public and professional stakeholder audiences and a campaign launch news story that can be adapted for your website.
Over the past few months, I have spoken at regional forums and other events about some of the changes we propose to make in how we work with local Healthwatch. These changes follow on from what we shared with you in Our Future Focus and in my last blog with Louise Ansari.
In proposing these changes, we're keeping in mind the priorities you shared with us:
Here’s what I’m covering and what they mean for your Healthwatch:
In response to your feedback, this year we have reduced the number of questions in the annual survey.
Click here to see what data we intend to collect in the annual survey in September.
Our annual report, which is presented to Parliament, makes the case for investment in Healthwatch and supports the National Committee with their statutory role in ensuring Healthwatch activities are carried out properly.
In our last blog, we asked for your help to significantly improve the response rate to our Healthwatch People Diversity Survey, as the response rate was less than 40% in 2022.
We said we would send you the questions in advance, which you can view here.
This year we are asking for data on the combined total of your staff, volunteers and Board. The data you provide will be anonymous and not linked to your individual Healthwatch – but we will ask whether your Healthwatch has completed the survey using a linked but separate survey.
If you currently do not have the required data on the demographic composition of your staff, volunteers and Board/Advisory Board members, you can use the Healthwatch Diversity Survey template which is available on this page and in SMART Survey if you have an account. Go to ‘My Surveys’ in SMART Survey, make a copy and then you can send this to your staff, volunteers and Board members.
Given that Healthwatch advocate for health equity, it is important that we strive to reflect the communities we serve. Our training programme includes support for Healthwatch on improving volunteer and Board diversity. We want to track whether these and other measures that individual Healthwatch are taking are making a difference. We'll report the results back to the network.
You told us we should make better use of your stories of change – to support raising our profile, demonstrating what Healthwatch have achieved and sharing what's working with Healthwatch and our external stakeholders.
We're currently analysing all of your annual reports to get a picture of the individual and collective impact of Healthwatch. We'll draw on your examples to support our national work and share them in forthcoming newsletters.
Please also start using our new Impact Tracker or the simplified sheet to tell us about the difference you’re making on an ongoing basis. The more of your recent success stories available to promote and talk to national stakeholders about, the better.
You may be aware that the Care Quality Commission (CQC) are piloting how they will assess local authorities and Integrated Care Systems. Healthwatch England is working with CQC to support local Healthwatch in the pilot areas which will be evaluated. We will share learnings from the pilots with Healthwatch so you know what to expect and how CQC will engage with you.
You will have a dedicated point of contact within CQC, but be aware that some posts are yet to be filled. If you are unsure who to contact at CQC, please get in touch with your Regional Manager.
Demonstrating your effectiveness is never more important than in difficult financial times. Over three quarters of Healthwatch have now completed the Quality Framework - with 50 in the last year.
We’re continuing to support Healthwatch who want to undertake the self-assessment process. Some have used the process to help prepare for a tender process, while others have used it in preparation for a new strategy. We’ve seen several Healthwatch use it to consider how they apply equality, diversity and inclusion across their work. We’re recommending Healthwatch complete it every three years.
Analysis of completed Quality Frameworks demonstrates many strengths, including reaching and engaging with people facing the greatest health inequalities and managing people. Healthwatch reported challenges with the role of Boards/Advisory Boards who support the governance and decision-making of Healthwatch and meeting the statutory requirement for transparency in our work. In response, we developed an extensive programme to support your boards with recruitment and self-appraisals, from which we developed guidance for both hosted and standalone Healthwatch.
We’ve made it easier to complete using the improved Smart Survey format, which we expect all Healthwatch to use after December 2023.
We’re introducing a badge so your Healthwatch can demonstrate your commitment to improvement. This could be displayed on your website footer, email signature or other appropriate materials. If you are eligible, you will receive an offer directly.
We encourage all Healthwatch to have at least an annual check-in with their Regional Manager. We use these meetings to check if you have any support needs and talk through the Quality Framework if you have recently completed it. It’s a really important opportunity for us to make sure we understand your needs so we can inform our national work and how we can best support you.
In response to requests from Healthwatch, we are establishing a network for Healthwatch ICS Representatives, with the first meeting taking place on 12 October. For ICS areas with more than one Healthwatch, you will need to decide among yourselves who will represent your area. You can sign up here.
Local Healthwatch tell us that our new Data Sharing Platform is easy to use. Between April and June, 21,839 pieces of feedback were shared with us by 54 Healthwatch from 28 ICS areas. We’re in the process of onboarding the remaining Healthwatch and supporting you to regularly share your data.
We are also seeing a welcome increase in demographic data, which helps our analysis and enables us to highlight where the health and care system needs to listen better and take further action, including on tackling inequalities.
A big thank you to everyone for helping us; keep sharing your data and reach out if you need any help: DataSharing@Healthwatch.co.uk.
Annual Satisfaction Survey
Every year, your insights have been instrumental in shaping our support to Healthwatch. This year, we are requesting each Healthwatch to complete the satisfaction survey responses on behalf of your organisation. This survey will provide a comprehensive understanding of the views and experiences of your staff, volunteers, and board members collectively, helping us to learn and tailor our support to better meet your needs.
Healthwatch People Diversity Survey.
As part of our commitment to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, set out in our Roadmap, we collect data about the demographic profile of Healthwatch staff, volunteers, and Board/Advisory board members. We use the data to help us track the extent to which we reflect the communities we serve and whether the measures taken by individual Healthwatch together with the training provided by Healthwatch England are making a difference. You can view and download the questions below.
The single survey is made up of two parts for your convenience and efficiency. Both sets of information will need to be uploaded together. You can access the template survey, and it is also available in SMART survey to copy and download and use for those Healthwatch with a licence.
To upload your data, please go to this link. Survey responses are needed by 28 February 2024.
Healthwatch are increasingly focussing on planning for, identifying and communicating outcomes and impact achieved for people who use health and care services. This contributes to ensuring your organisation's financial stability and increases support from members of the community.
Recruiting a volunteer to take on responsibilities relating to monitoring outcomes can help give this work a greater profile within your Healthwatch. In particular, the role could provide additional capacity to update the Impact Tracker and liaise with other team members to check on how different areas of work and opportunities to influence are progressing.
This document provides guidance and tips on introducing an Impact Assistant volunteer role. It includes a suggested role profile.
The profile for this role has been developed so that it can be adapted to meet your specific local needs. Create your own role description by using whichever of the listed activities you feel will be most useful for your team.
In a competitive volunteering marketplace, Impact Assistant could be an attractive and unique volunteering role for the right person.
This guidance and role profile is an addition to our other volunteer role descriptions, which are available for you to use and adapt.
This latest Impact Tracker has been designed to help your Healthwatch keep an ongoing record of outcomes and impact you are working towards and then summarise what you have achieved in a single document.
It also allows you to select outcomes you’d like to share with us, so we can promote them more widely and make a stronger case nationally for the power of the network.
Should you decide you don’t need to use the Tracker, there's a simple alternative spreadsheet you can still use to share the outcomes you achieve with us.
Demonstrating impact is important to help secure future funding and ensure that we are seen as a credible organisation both locally and nationally.
This Tracker will help you to:
The Tracker contains an instruction sheet.
For you to be able to use the Tracker properly, you must:
Important: If a warning comes up about macros, or you are asked to choose whether to allow/enable them, then you need to confirm ‘enabling’ them. Otherwise, a couple of the features of the spreadsheet won’t work. The message you get and need to confirm might look like this:
If your IT system is run by another organisation, then you might find it’s set so you can’t ever enable macros. This might mean you need to ask them it’s possible to do so with this one spreadsheet. Or it might mean it’s not feasible for you to use it fully.
Use the Tracker as much or as little as you find useful for your team's needs. The three main sheets we suggest you might want to use are to keep a record of outcomes from individual enquiries, published reports, and other influencing work. But you could start by using just one or two of those and see how it goes.
Each of these main sheets has 300 rows that you can use before you would need to start using a completely new Tracker spreadsheet.
Other sheets will be useful for some but not all Healthwatch.
The level of detail you record is entirely up to you. Decide how to incorporate completing it into your weekly or monthly ways of working.
You may want to consider introducing a new Impact Assistant volunteer role to try and recruit someone to specifically help support the team’s use of the Tracker.
The instruction sheet in the Tracker explains how to select any entries you’d like to share with us. You are then able to quickly save a separate ‘sharing sheet’.
At any point, just email this saved sheet to us at: impact@healthwatch.co.uk
We'll be collating all the outcomes shared with us so we can promote your achievements during national conversations and refer to them in our policy discussions.
We hope you find the Tracker a useful working tool. However, if you don’t need to use it, we’re still really keen to hear about the outcomes and impact your Healthwatch achieves.
You can use this simple reporting document to describe and share your successes with us in a way that lets us easily collate achievements from across the network. Instructions are included, and you can email a copy to the address above anytime.
It's a legal requirement for your local Healthwatch to produce an annual report by the end of June. To help you do this, use our template, which is available in PowerPoint and InDesign formats on the Communications Centre (Brandstencil).
The template includes a branded design, as well as guidance on how to complete your report, what to change and what you need to include in your report.
Please note you will need to be logged in to see the resources on The Communications Centre. There is one account per local Healthwatch, however if you are having problems accessing your account please email hub@healthwatch.co.uk
It's great if you can personalise the report with local photography. However, we've also added a new album on our Flickr library, with images that you can use throughout your report.
These images are all selected to fit with the new visual brand guidelines.
As always, we are running a series of webinars to help support you in producing your annual report.
This session will help you to understand how to use the PowerPoint template, from changing pictures, updating text and adding or deleting slides.
13 April 2023 | 10am - 11.30am
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. These training sessions will be repeated twice as numbers are limited.
You can download the PowerPoint presentation, InDesign templates, and guidance notes below if you can't access the Communications Centre (Brandstencil).
Once you have published your annual report, you need to send it to:
The deadline for submitting your annual report is Friday 30 June 2023.
If you have any problems or concerns meeting this deadline, please speak to your regional manager as soon as possible.
To submit your report, you need to upload your finished document through the web form linked below
Each year we ask you for:
We also ask about your learning needs every two years.
We use this information to shape the support we provide to you.
We’d like all Healthwatch staff and Board members to complete the combined Satisfaction and Learning Needs survey for 2023.
This is anonymous, only takes five minutes to complete and will help us learn and improve how we can best support you.
We heard mixed views about how we communicate with you. Some of you have seen a better flow of communications. However, we’ve had a strong message that we should reduce the number of asks and improve how we communicate our priorities.
You should have noticed that we’ve introduced the Month Ahead – which sets out forthcoming campaigns, publication of new resources and guidance and the priority areas we would like you to tell us about, such as winter pressures. We share this on Workplace and in the newsletter on a monthly basis.
At the time of the last Satisfaction Survey, Integrated Care Systems were not yet legal entities. You told us that support and resources on working with ICSs had been welcome. In the annual survey, 80% of you reported that relationships were effective when working with other Healthwatch within ICSs and 70% reported effective relationships with your ICS/ICB.
Along with last year’s annual survey, we included an anonymous survey on the demographic profile of Healthwatch boards, staff and volunteers to understand the extent it reflects the national profile with respect to protected characteristics. We want to track the diversity in the network – the importance of which Berkeley Wilde, CEO of the Diversity Trust recently spoke about at the meeting of Lead Officers to assist in understanding whether the actions Healthwatch are taking individually and collectively are having an impact.
Disappointingly, due to a low response rate we are unable to carry out meaningful analysis and establish an accurate benchmark. Only 40% of Healthwatch completed the survey. We will be repeating the survey in 2023 and will review how best to improve the response rate from Healthwatch and would welcome your cooperation.
We get a lot of positive feedback about the range and quality of learning opportunities and resources available, including the introduction of e learning and sessions led by other local Healthwatch where you can learn from them.
Last time, you told us that we should consider co-ordination of resources to prevent duplication and overburdening Healthwatch. We have a new process in place for new resources which we tell you about through the ‘Month Ahead’.
You asked us to consider core skills and to make it clearer which guidance and training is suitable for different roles and skill levels – something we will be addressing in 2023. Don’t forget to ask staff and Board members at your Healthwatch to share their views about the support we provide via our survey.
You asked for resources on research skills. Over the past year we’ve produced a range of resources including:
We have also created a dedicated online area with links to resources on data and digital, including data protection.
I hope you can see that we value every bit of feedback we receive through these surveys, as well as through other means, including informal chats. So whether positive or telling us how we can improve, we are keen to listen, so please encourage your staff and Board members to complete this year’s survey.
Gavin Macgregor
Head of Network Development
