Healthwatch Hertfordshire - Our Annual Report for 2017/18
It is Annual Report time, and a chance to reflect on another positive and achieving year. This report portrays an exciting picture of the wide range of activities and achievements over the last 12 months.
We can be proud of our achievements over the past year but know that we want to work differently to ensure we achieve the most we can in the future. This report includes our approach to taking stock of our work and new approaches adopted.
Overall it has been a year of change at Healthwatch Hertfordshire with five new members joining the Board, new staff and job roles to reflect our strategic and operational needs, changes to our volunteering approach and a move to new offices.
Our key projects and research this year included:
- Providing feedback to Hertfordshire Partnership Foundation Trust on their revised complaints policy
- Giving independent advice to West Herts Hospital Trust on their approach to complaints handling
- Working with Stockwell Lodge GP practice to improve how it provides services and help to improve their CQC rating
- A Mystery Shopping exercise requested by Herts Community Trust to test out how people visiting a range of services – including children’s services and audiology - are greeted
- Working with the University of Hertfordshire on an Eastern European Project to tackle health inequalities in service provision
Some statistics from our year:
- 72 active volunteers helped us to carry out our work and gave up over 2,343 hours of their time
- Our 1,955 followers on twitter received 1,598 tweets from us
- We carried out 18 Enter and View visits
- 307 improvements we suggested were adopted by services to make health and care better in our community
- Over 4,000 members received our newsletter
To ensure we are addressing the most important issues affecting patients and service users we agreed a focus on the following areas:
- Mental Health – working closing with Viewpoint to improve mental health services and working together on projects in the future
- Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STP). This involves the entire health and social care system working together, and we will be keeping an eye on how this progresses
- We will work on engaging with existing patient and public involvement groups to understand what patients are saying about services in their local areas
- To ensure we are a sustainable organisation, we have been working towards generating additional income
- In recognition of the importance of primary care services, we will prioritise any work involving these services and have already been doing a lot of work with Dentists.
