Your health and social care champion
Healthwatch Staffordshire is your local health and social care champion. From Hospitals to Care homes and everywhere in between, we make sure National Health Service (NHS) leaders and other decision-makers hear your voice and use your feedback to improve care.
We Monitor
Through our community engagement activities, data intelligence systems, enter and view programme and our Healthwatch Champions, we continually monitor service delivery through concerns raised, feedback received and the Healthwatch Public Advisory Group use this intelligence to inform and shape the Healthwatch priorities and activities.
We Analyse
Using our bespoke evidence and insight software and in-house research expertise, we analyse consumer feedback as well as a broad range of data sources to produce evidence and insight reports and information dashboards which can provide trends, statistical and performance analysis of services for use in monitoring and challenging service commissioning and provision.
We Investigate
We use our various sources of intelligence, and our range of powers, including the ability to enter and view provider premises, to investigate where concerns about services have been raised. We promote opportunities for consumer involvement in consultations, service reviews and surveys and actively seek out consumer feedback on their experiences of health and social care services across Staffordshire. Using our powers to request information we raise issues with and seek answers from commissioners and providers in order to support our investigation of concerns.
We Challenge
Using our evidence and insight reports and data dashboards as a robust evidence base, we challenge commissioners and providers on the quality, access and delivery of health and social care services and ensure that these are acted upon. We always seek feedback on what has been done as a result of our reports, and in turn report this back publicly.
Using our evidence and insight reports and data dashboards as a robust evidence base, we challenge commissioners and providers on the quality, access and delivery of health and social care services and ensure that these are acted upon. We always seek feedback on what has been done as a result of our reports, and in turn report this back publicly.
How We Work
Healthwatch Staffordshire are an independent watchdog that has been formed to make local health and social care services better for people by ensuring that their views and experiences are taken into account by those entrusted to design and run services.
Like all local Healthwatch bodies, Healthwatch Staffordshire has a statutory seat on the local Health and Wellbeing Boards – the body that oversees health and social care in the city and county. We also have the statutory power to enter and view health and social care services using our trained volunteers. Healthwatch Staffordshire has a place on the new Quality Surveillance Groups that are being set up in the NHS to monitor provider quality.
We also have a statutory duty to report annually to Healthwatch England and publicly on engagement activities and how we have represented patients and social care users as well as the impact of these activities.
Our Statutory Duties:
- Promoting and supporting the involvement of local people in the commissioning, provision and scrutiny of local care services.
- Enabling local people to monitor the standard of provision of local care services and whether and how local care services could and ought to be improved.
- Obtaining the views of local people regarding their needs for, and experiences of, local care services and importantly to make these views known.
- Making reports and recommendations about how local care services could or ought to be improved. These should be directed to commissioners and providers of care services, and people responsible for managing or scrutinising local care services and shared with Healthwatch England.
- Providing advice and information about access to local care services so choices can be made about local care services.
- Formulating views on the standard of provision and whether and how the local care services could and ought to be improved and sharing these views with Healthwatch England.
- Making recommendations to Healthwatch England to advise the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to conduct special reviews or investigations (or where the circumstances justify doing so, making recommendations direct to the CQC) and to make recommendations to Healthwatch England to publish reports about particular issues.
- Providing Healthwatch England with the intelligence and insight it needs to enable it to perform effectively.