The New Year’s here and Healthwatch has announced the key health and care topics their local teams – including, of course, HEALTHWATCH TORBAY – will be working on over the year ahead.
Why not get involved to help us meet our goals?
Over the last year Healthwatch engaged with over 400,000 people about their experiences of care. Now, the five priorities for 2019 are:
- Primary care (including access to GPs)
- Children and young people
- Mental health
- Services working better together
- Adult social care, including residential care homes or care at home
People’s Concerns
As the vast majority of people’s experiences of the NHS coming through their GP, it’s not surprising to see it top this year’s list. While most people are happy with their GP practice, people aren’t entirely satisfied, especially when it comes to getting an appointment soon enough.
Healthwatch also knows that children and young people have their own ideas of how they would like health and social care services to be and which issues are important to them. Poverty, disability discrimination and poor housing are some of the issues they face, as well as the challenges a of being young carers.
On mental health, Healthwatch research has shown that people recognise the improving support on offer through their GP, but that they want to see more peer support too.
Getting Involved
While these issues and more will be explored by Healthwatch Torbay network in 2019 to help services make the improvements people want to see, building on the day-to-day activities of our network of volunteers who visit hospitals, GPs and care homes etc, and engage with local people at events all across the Bay.
To do all of this well, Healthwatch Torbay need the support of still more local people to join our volunteers and help us smash last year’s recording breaking efforts.
We also need more people to come forward and share their experiences and ideas with us, and help Healthwatch England reach the goal of hearing from more than one million people a year.
If you’d like to get involved in 2019, you can visit our website, give us a freephone call on 08000- 520 059 , or simply pop into our offices in Paignton’s Library and Information Centre, open Monday to Friday.
Bob Jope Healthwatch Torbay
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