Welcome to our comprehensive suite of Enter and View resources and training materials. 

Here, you can find ready-to-deliver sessions to run for your volunteers. There’s an introductory training for anyone new to conducting Enter and View visits, with both classroom and online versions, and a follow-on course focusing on residential and nursing care home visits.

To complement this work for residential and nursing care homes, there’s also a conversation prompt sheet for the day of the visit and a template for your final report.

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

Introduction to Enter and View training

All Healthwatch can carry out Enter and View visits, and authorised representatives are needed to do this. You told us you would like help training your volunteers and staff to become authorised representatives.

Thanks to Healthwatch Redbridge, which produced the introductory training pack and supporting materials, you can be confident that your session will be based on their wealth of experience. The pack includes slides, handouts, case studies, and comprehensive session plans for both online and classroom-based sessions.

Step-by-step instructions will help you prepare and deliver your training session.

Enter and View for residential and nursing care homes training

The majority of Healthwatch Enter and View visits are to care homes. You told us you would like help to further develop the skills of authorised representatives who have completed the introductory training.

Thanks to Healthwatch Milton Keynes, you can use the PowerPoint slides here to deliver an in-person or online session that helps people focus on key issues for care home residents and ensure visits are as impactful as possible. It’s ideal for authorised representatives who are just starting on their visits but also allows those who have been in the role for a while to reflect on their practice.

Healthwatch Milton Keynes has extensive experience undertaking this work in care homes, so the programme includes a useful mixture of knowledge, insight, and tips. Thanks also to those other Healthwatch who fed in comments and suggestions as the training was developed to help ensure it covers as many key areas as possible.

The notes section of the PowerPoint slides includes all the instructions for you to deliver the session to your group. There’s a separate Word document that just includes your trainer notes.

There’s also a version of the slides without the notes, which you can send to participants in advance should they request this.

Enter and View for residential and nursing care homes: practical resources

Healthwatch Milton Keynes, with input from other Healthwatch, has developed templates for you to use for visits to residential and nursing care homes. These help authorised representatives focus on the key areas of importance for residents and ensure a visit is as effective as possible.

The conversation prompt sheet provides suggestions for topics to explore with residents and staff and also includes prompts to help focus on the most important issues when observing life in the home.

Used alongside the accompanying Enter and View report template for care homes, you can be sure of increasing the opportunity for impact with your Enter and View work. There are two versions of the report template, allowing you to use either a large or small photograph on the front cover.

You should find the new platform familiar and easy to use and we’re aiming to go live with it in July.

To begin with, we’ll simplify the number of groups to keep things clear and manageable. We’ll listen to feedback from the Healthwatch network and can adjust these groups as needed. Importantly, all content from the past two years on Workplace will be carried over, so you’ll still be able to refer to previous discussions.

We’re also working to make it easier for you to access Healthwatch England policy updates and to ask questions or message others quickly and easily.

There’s no action needed from you just yet and no need to request a WorkVivo login.

We’ll be in touch soon with details on how to access the new platform. Before launch, we’ll offer several opportunities to preview the platform and share your thoughts. Once live, a dedicated user area will be available where you can ask queries and give feedback directly.

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.