Exploring Healthwatch
Healthwatch organisations were set up in England in 2012 by an Act of Parliament to pick up public and patient concerns and views of their local health and care services. There are 150 Healthwatch in England and each local authority must fund a Healthwatch service. Healthwatch use the insights gathered to advise council and NHS leaders about their communities’ needs, to ensure that residents’ views are heard and acted on in decisions about local health and care services. In this podcast series, we talk to people who work in Healthwatch as well as those who’ve followed its journey since 2012. We explore the role of Healthwatch in their local communities and health systems and ask how Healthwatch has responded to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and of major recent changes in the way NHS healthcare is planned and provided. We hope this series will give you an insight into these organisations, which remain largely unknown despite their mission of conveying people’s voices.
Episodes
Episodes
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
Healthwatch past, present and future
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
How did we end up with Healthwatch as the statutory, government-funded way of providing patient and public voice in England? What came before and how is Healthwatch different? How is Healthwatch's ability to provide patient and public voice affected by recent shifts in health policy? We explore these questions in conversation with Professor Graham Martin, Director of Research at The Health Improvement Studies Institute at the University of Cambridge.
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
How does a local Healthwatch work?
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
There are local Healthwatch organisations in every council area in England. How do they work to promote public and patient voice in health and care? In this episode, we talk to Michelle Thompson, CEO of Healthwatch Darlington. We discuss the funding and staffing challenges facing local Healthwatch and also get an insight into how local Healthwatch changed the way it worked during the COVID-19 pandemic so that it could continue communicating with the communities and partners it serves.
Exploring Healthwatch
This podcast is hosted and produced by Amit Desai and Giulia Zoccatelli. Amit and Giulia are Research Fellows at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care, King's College London.
From 2018 to 2021, we were part of a study team exploring the everyday work and relationships of local Healthwatch in England to find out what they do and how they do it, what challenges they face, and what motivates their staff and volunteers. We did this by doing fieldwork over the course of a year (2019-2020) with 5 local Healthwatch organisations in different parts of England. We followed Healthwatch staff and volunteers as they engaged members of the public, wrote reports, and attended meetings with NHS hospital managers, local authority officers and others. We also had detailed conversations with them about their work and professional lives.
Our thanks to all those who participated in the podcast series and in our study.
Find out more about our research here: //www.journalslibrary.nihr.ac.uk/hsdr/YUTI9128#/full-report
The Healthwatch study team are Sally Brearley (King's College London), Amit Desai (King's College London), Graham Martin (University of Cambridge), Glenn Robert (King's College London) and Giulia Zoccatelli (King's College London).
This podcast was produced as part of a project funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The study was funded by the NIHR Health and Social Care Delivery Research Programme (award number 17/05/110 HSDR). The views expressed are those of the study team and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.