Year: 2019

This is my last blog for Healthwatch Camden, after nearly seven years here I am moving on. I want to welcome my successor, Matthew Parris who joins us from Healthwatch Surrey.

Your Voice Counts

We’ve been analysing what people said in our “Your Voice Counts” survey at community events over the summer. We asked about different aspects of the NHS Long Term Plan.

We found that two topics were dominating people’s concerns: mental health services for young people and the plans for ‘digital first’ primary care services. 

So we explored these themes in more detail at our community forum on 8 October, and we’ll be launching projects on both topics over the winter.

Transport

Healthwatch Camden often hears anecdotal reports about poor patient experiences of hospital outpatient appointments. We wanted to better understand the patient experience starting with a GP referral right up to the day of the hospital appointment.

Over three weeks in spring 2019, we interviewed patients in the outpatient clinic waiting areas at both the Royal Free Hospital and University College London Hospital (UCLH).

We’re in the latest Greenwood centre newsletter. The centre is Camden’s new home for day services and the borough’s first Centre for Independent living.

The article highlights the impact of our collaboration with Camden Disability Action to evaluate how accessible Camden’s community centres are for people with a disability. 

Our trustee Sarah was recently featured on UCL’s Public Engagement Blog. The blog was created to help UCL share stories of successful public engagement, raise questions and invite collaboration. See Sarah’s blog post here.

June 1 -7 is Volunteers’ Week. To thank our volunteers for the hard work and time they contribute we hosted an event at our offices in the Greenwood centre.

Volunteers help us to get more local people’s voices heard on health and social care provision in Camden. We recruit volunteers on a project-to-project basis to make sure that they get the skills and experience they need.

At our board meeting in Public and Community Forum on 2 July we launched our annual report for 2018-19.

This years’ theme was ‘Different voices – stronger voices’. Every change we’ve helped to bring about in health and social care started with listening to someone who uses services.

Examples of our impact include:

For our Impact of Food Poverty Project we asked the Felix Project  their views on how food poverty and waste can be tackled. Find out what they’re doing in this guest blog post.  

Children’s Food Initiatives

At the Felix Project we have twin objectives; to reduce the scandalous levels of food waste and to address the equally concerning levels of hunger and food poverty. Increasingly, we are working with partner charities and schools and turning our attention to child food poverty.

Our Food Poverty report is in the Ham & High local newspaper today! 

For our impact of Food Poverty social media project we asked people to give their views on what holds them back from eating a healthy diet.

Here’s what Lawrence had to say:

“I guess I’m not what people would perceive to be the typical person who would struggle with life issues, and therefore need to use a food bank, but things happen to us all – how often do we hear about celebrities struggling?