healthwatch solihull update report health and adult social
TRANSCRIPT
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Healthwatch Solihull Update Report
Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Committee
August 2021
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Healthwatch Solihull Update Report
Health and Adult Social Care Scrutiny Committee
August 2021
Contents
Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 3
Background - About Healthwatch Solihull ....................................................................................... 4
Our Model and Delivery Structure ..................................................................................................... 5
Our Statutory Functions .................................................................................................................. 5
Delivering Outcomes for Solihull Citizens .................................................................................... 5
Our Model .......................................................................................................................................... 6
Governance ....................................................................................................................................... 7
Staff Structure .................................................................................................................................. 8
Our Activity – Year 1 (July 2020 – June 2021) ................................................................................. 9
Our Annual Report 2020-21 ............................................................................................................ 9
Engagement, Involvement and Reach .......................................................................................... 9
Feedback Heard ................................................................................................................................ 9
Marketing and Communications ................................................................................................... 10
Community Engagement ............................................................................................................... 11
Citizen Voice ................................................................................................................................... 12
Information and Signposting......................................................................................................... 13
Influence and Impact ......................................................................................................................... 14
Investigation and Follow-up Reports .......................................................................................... 14
Volunteering ......................................................................................................................................... 16
Priorities for 2021-22 ............................................................................................................................ 17
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Introduction
This report highlights the achievements of Healthwatch Solihull in the first year of this
contract period (20-21) and the impact gained for Solihull citizens.
It has been a very difficult year for residents in Solihull, with Healthwatch Solihull’s
purpose becoming both more essential and more challenging during the Covid-19
pandemic. People’s care has been disrupted as health and social care services responded
to increased and unprecedented pressure, while social distancing restrictions made it
impossible to gather feedback from the public face-to-face.
Throughout the crisis, we have endeavoured to help services provide the best possible
support for those most in need, and reach more marginalised groups with essential
information about social distancing, testing and vaccines. Never before has our
Information & Signposting line been so important. It enabled us to provide support to
Solihull citizens.
We developed innovative ways of working online, providing new routes for individuals to
feedback about how the pandemic has affected them and reaching out to the most
vulnerable to highlight their needs. The feedback we received was used to help reassure
the public that services are listening to and acting upon their concerns, whichever of
Solihull’s many diverse communities they belong to.
The pandemic has revealed deep weaknesses in our society, but also the strength of
people coming together. It is this collective strength we draw upon and which enables
Healthwatch Solihull to make such a difference. We would like to thank everyone who has
worked with us in the past year. This includes health and social care staff, commissioners
and providers, third sector organisations and the many other stakeholders who share our
dedication to eradicating health inequalities.
Most importantly we would like to thank the thousands of people who told us their views
on health and social care services in the past year. We aim to ensure everyone can have
their voice heard and believe this report demonstrates the positive impact people sharing
their individual experiences has on health and social care services for all of Solihull’s
citizens.
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Background - About Healthwatch Solihull
Healthwatch Solihull is the independent champion for people who use health and social
care services in Solihull. We’re here to find out what matters to people and help make
sure their views shape the support they need, by sharing these views with those who have
the power to make change happen.
We also help people find the information they need about services in their area. This has
been vital during the pandemic with the ever-changing environment and restrictions
limiting people’s access to health and social care services.
The current contractual arrangements for Healthwatch Solihull began 1st July 2020 for a 5-
year period (3+1+1).
The contract value for Healthwatch Solihull is £155,322.30 per annum.
Every Local Authority in England has a Local Healthwatch. Collectively, Healthwatch form
a national network supported by Healthwatch England.
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Our Model and Delivery Structure
Our Statutory Functions
1. Function One: Gathering views and understanding the experiences of people who
use services, carers and the wider community
2. Function Two: Making people’s views known
3. Function Three: Promoting and supporting the involvement of people in the
commissioning and provision of local care services and how they are scrutinised
4. Function Four: Recommending investigation or special review of services via
Healthwatch England or directly to the Care Quality Commission (CQC)
5. Function Five: Providing information (signposting) about access to services and
support for making informed choices
6. Function Six: Making the views and experiences of people known to Healthwatch
England (and to other local Healthwatch organisations), and providing a steer to
help it carry out its role as national champion
7. Function Seven: NHS Complaints Advocacy (Referral to)
Delivering Outcomes for Solihull Citizens
Our delivery model is focused on delivering impact for Solihull citizens, demonstrated by
the changes we influence in health and social care. Our Business Plan for 2020 – 2023 can
be found as an attachment to this report. Through the delivery of our Business Plan we
aim for:
1. More citizens are aware of Healthwatch Solihull and have growing trust and
confidence in our work.
2. Increased levels of public involvement in our work.
3. More citizens, especially those most unlikely to be involved, have shared their
feedback with us about Solihull health and social care services.
4. More citizens access the right services at the right time through effective
information and signposting, including increased understanding of their rights and
responsibilities and where to turn when things go wrong or they have a complaint.
5. Provide challenge and support to the Solihull health and social care system so that
citizens are at the heart of decision making.
6. The voice of the citizen has an impact in the commissioning and improvement of
local health and social care services.
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Our Model
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Governance
In January 2021, we welcomed a new Chair for Healthwatch Solihull and Healthwatch
Birmingham. Richard Burden took over from Danielle Oum who stepped down in November
2020 to take up the Chair role at Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust.
Our Healthwatch board currently consists of eight members who work on a voluntary basis
to provide direction, oversight and scrutiny to our activities. Our board ensures that
decisions about priority areas of work reflect the concerns and interests of our diverse
local community. Through 2020/21 the board met four times and made decisions on
matters such as maximising our support for vulnerability throughout the pandemic and our
focus on inequalities.
We ensure wider public involvement in deciding our work priorities. We use a range of
tools to identify key themes and make decisions, we include our group of volunteers who
help us to engage with local community groups, as well as being part of large public
forums, and listening to what people tell us on our Information and Signposting line.
In January 2021, we recruited a Healthwatch Solihull Volunteer Representative to the
Board. Voted for and elected from the Healthwatch Solihull pool of volunteers, this role
enables the voice of Solihull volunteers to be heard at the highest level, influencing our
decisions and direction.
In November 2020, we aimed to recruit additional non-executive directors (NEDs) from
Solihull to join the Board. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in recruiting the calibre of
applicant required on this occasion. As a result, we have changed our approach to non-
executive recruitment and carried out a more targeted recruitment process. As a result
we are interviewing potential new Solihul NEDs in August 2021. We are focused on
ensuring the voice of Solihull residents in present at governance level.
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Staff Structure
As a result of the TUPE process we started the delivery of the Healthwatch Solihull
contract with 2 full-time members of staff, supported by a senior management team
covering the Solihull and Birmingham areas.
In the autumn 2020, we recruited new staff to the full compliment of 4.4 FTE staff
working on the Healthwatch Solihull Contract. The staff structure is as follows;
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Our Activity – Year 1 (July 2020 – June 2021)
Our Annual Report 2020-21
As per our statutory obligations, our annual report was published and shared with key
stakeholders by the 30th June 2021. This annual report covering the period April 2020 –
March 2021 can be found https://healthwatchsolihull.org.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2021/06/Annual-Report-Final-20-21.pdf .
The content of this report focuses on the achievements of our contractual year July 2020
to June 2021.
Engagement, Involvement and Reach
KPI Annual Target Actual
Reach – The number of individuals who have seen information about Healthwatch Solihull.
6000 399,000
Engagement – The number of individuals who have interacted with Healthwatch Solihull.
4500 10,000
The way we reach into the communities of Solihull and engage with citizens is central to
our work. Through the pandemic we worked hard to develop new ways of reaching
communities developing our skills to work online. This has been through social media and
virtual events.
Online engagement has become one of our real strengths with increasing connections
online and developing ways to engage individuals in our activities.
Key to our work moving forward is how we maintain our high-levels of online engagement
and compliment this with our face-to-face engagement activity.
Feedback Heard
KPI Annual Target Actual
Feedback Heard – Number of individual pieces of feedback about health and social care left with Healthwatch Solihull.
2000 2345
Throughout the year we developed our services to increase the amount of feedback we
heard about Health and Social care services. Despite the challenges of the pandemic and
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reduced access to health and social care services we successfully achieved our target
hearing a total of 2345 individual pieces of feedback.
This feedback heard was across a number of sources;
1) Online – social media and website contacts
2) Healthwatch Solihull Feedback Centre
3) Information and Signposting Services (Telephone and email)
4) Virtual Engagement Events
How we use this feedback and what individuals told us can be found in the Citizen voice
section of this report (page 12).
Marketing and Communications
KPI Annual Target Actual
Increased engagement with Digital Communication and Marketing
30% increase in followers across all channels
35% increase in followers across all Channels
Increased Website Traffic Baseline 8,211 36,412
Production of E-bulletin newsletters to promote Healthwatch Solihull.
4 12
Increased contacts in our public mailing list
30% increase 115% Increase
Increased contacts in our Stakeholder Mailing Lists
30% increase 60% Increase
Regular Website News stories published
Weekly
Weekly news stories published on our website (more frequent for urgent
news)
More and more PR and Media content featuring Healthwatch Solihull.
4 (Quarterly)
3 local radio interviews 12 Press stories published
featuring Healthwatch Solihull (Birmingham Mail
and Solihull Updates) Local TV News – Midlands
Today
The majority of our communications and marketing activity this year took place through
online channels which fast became the main point of contact for communities during the
pandemic. In particular, we increased our presence through social media growing the
number of followers by 35% across all channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and
YouTube.
Access to relevant and timely updates and news was important to Solihull citizens through
the pandemic. To support this, we published weekly news stories to ensure our website
was up to date with all relevant sources of information. This increased our website traffic
throughout the year resulting in a 440% increase in website traffic for 20-21 compared to
19-20.
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We were delighted to see an increased media interest in our work and have developed
good relationships with the press resulting in a number of online articles, radio
appearances and TV news items featuring Healthwatch Solihull.
To ensure we keep citizens and stakeholders up to date with our activities we developed a
monthly e-bulletin which was distributed to an increasing mailing list of stakeholders and
the public. This e-bulletin shared key information, celebrated our achievements and
advertised ways to be involved and leave feedback.
Community Engagement
Our community engagement activity throughout the pandemic has been online. We have
built strong ways of engaging individuals through social media with Healthwatch Solihull
being a regular contributor to targeted Facebook groups across Solihull. We also developed
the technology to hold virtual engagement meetings and events.
In May 2021, we pulled all our online engagement routes together as part of a Prize Draw
incentive scheme. Everyone who left feedback with Healthwatch Solihull during the month
of May was entered into the draw to win a £50 voucher for a local Solihull business. In
part, this was to support local Solihull businesses reopening after the winter lockdown
period. This initiative achieved an increase in feedback being left with Healthwatch
Solihull in this month.
Throughout the pandemic we were conscious that the online world was not for everyone
and wanted to reach out to those who were digitally excluded during this time. We did
this through a number of initiatives:
1) Increased relationships with our partners in the Voluntary, community and social
enterprise sector
2) Increased printed material – leaflets with food banks, posters distributed through
housing partners and leaflets distributed in the vaccination centres.
3) Increased relationships with Care Homes – by working with Solihull care homes we
developed ways to communicate and hear the feedback from care home residents
this included virtual visits with residents and/or telephone calls.
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Citizen Voice
Early in the pandemic, we heard from people about the lack of clear and often inaccurate
information. Because of this our role became much more focused on providing people with
clear, consistent advice and information to help address people’s concerns.
The key questions people asked included:
• When will I receive my vaccine invitation?
• When will GPs be offering face-to-face appointments?
• How can I find an NHS dentist who is offering appointments?
• When will my cancer treatment resume?
This insight into people’s access to the care they need and effective communication is
especially valuable now that the NHS is moving into the restoration and recovery of
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services. There is a high level of concern about the number of people whose treatments
have been delayed due to the pandemic, many with serious conditions such as cancer.
Early in the pandemic one lady told us: “without his treatment plan he won’t survive,
why are people with cancer being ignored?”
This is particularly the case at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust
(UHB), which has been the NHS Trust most severely impacted by the pandemic in the
country. Following a Care Quality Commission (CQC) report highlighting serious concerns
about patient safety at UHB, we pressed the Trust’s senior management to urgently
address the issues raised. We have also sought answers around UHB’s performance on
cancer waiting times before the pandemic, alongside its actions to tackle the current
backlog of treatments.
We are actively supporting UHB in this task by working with the Trust to ensure
communications with patients on waiting lists are clear, sensitive and appropriate for
people’s needs.
Information and Signposting
KPI Annual Target Actual
Number of individuals receiving Information and Signposting support via telephone, online and face-to-face.
250 268
Number of individuals accessing our Information and Signposting pages on the Website
250 271
Never before has our information and signposting function been so important. With the
pandemic and the closing of services individuals needed access to the right information in
a timely-manner. We worked hard to stay on top of all the changes across health and
social care to ensure we provided individuals with the correct information.
At the start of the pandemic the majority of our contacts focused on ensuring individuals
had access to the resources they needed: food, medication, mental health support and
shielding information. As the pandemic moved forward this shifted to providing individuals
with information about access health and social care services: GPs, Dentists and hospital
treatment.
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Influence and Impact
Investigation and Follow-up Reports
KPI Annual Target Actual
Number of Investigation reports Published
2 2
Follow-up Impact Reports 2 2
Summary of Impact as a result of our work
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Investigation Case Study – People’s experiences of access GP services Via Technology.
People being able to get an appointment with a GP has been a priority for Healthwatch Solihull.
Over the last year, we have frequently been told about the difficulty of accessing GP services via technology (by
telephone, website, app or video call).
The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically reduced the number of face-to-face appointments and interactions at
general practice premises. It was therefore important for us to hear and report Solihull residents’ experiences
of accessing and having consultations via technology.
An online survey was completed in November 2020 by residents (16+ years old) who are registered to a general
practice in Solihull. It included an invitation for people to share their experiences verbally with us. We
advertised the survey with the help of local Solihull organisations, and by sharing it in meetings with health and
social care providers.
Thanks to patients sharing their experiences we were able to identify key issues and engage with Primary
Care Networks (PCNs) in Solihull to implement changes.
The main findings of our report identified that, whilst the public understands the necessity of the use of
telephone and video call consultations in addition to face-to-face appointments, there are still concerns.
We heard through our survey that 57% of our respondents found accessing technology-based services ‘very
difficult’ or ‘difficult’.
Respondents experienced problems during telephone and video consultations due to issues like the lack of
visual cues that cannot conveyed via telephone consultations or issues with understanding healthcare
professionals’ tone of voice or accent on the telephone. 86% of respondents did not have an option to choose
between having telephone appointments or video call appointments.
The issue surrounding insufficient GP telephone lines was a common issue for respondents. Patients
emphasised that they are working, or have other tasks, that may not allow them to wait more than an hour on
the telephone. It was therefore often problematic that general practices do not give specific times or periods
for telephone consultations/appointment. Respondents also had fears about confidentiality related to the use
of technology.
In response to the report the PCNs acknowledged the need for clearer explanations on access via technology,
including;
• The need to improve website information and accessibility.
• The plurality of options to access surgeries to support people with constraints, such as; work, caring
responsibilities, disabilities, language barriers, etc.
• How to access face-to-face consultations if technology is a barrier.
• Clarity about telephone call-back times (and whether it is acceptable for patients to use their phones
whilst awaiting a call).
• Processes around missed calls and if practices will phone again and how many times.
• The confidentiality of digital tools.
We have also been working closely with Birmingham and Solihull CCG around the findings of this report to
support PCNs to make the changes needed.
Read our full report https://healthwatchsolihull.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/HWS-GP-Access-June-
2021.pdf
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Volunteering
KPI Annual Target Actual
Number of Active volunteers
10 12
This has been a challenging year for our volunteers, who have not been able to be as
active in their communities as they normally would be. It has been essential throughout
the pandemic for us to support our volunteers as much as possible. Either through
volunteering with Healthwatch Solihull or supporting them to be active supporting
individuals in their local communities.
Through regular meetings and engagement sessions with volunteers we have kept our
volunteers active, helping us to be innovative in the ways we engage with citizens. This
year our volunteers:
• Provided support on our GP access project by testing out surveys and providing
input when deciding the research topic.
• Took part in mystery shopping and online feedback gathering.
• Represented the voices of Solihull residents and volunteers at virtual Board
meetings.
• Continued to support Healthwatch Solihull from home by attending virtual
meetings and assisting with projects.
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Priorities for 2021-22
The past year has been extremely testing for Solihull. Health and social care services have
worked tirelessly under unprecedented pressure to care for citizens during the pandemic,
and we at Healthwatch Solihull have done our utmost to support the fight against Covid-
19. Yet while the vaccine programme offers hope, the challenges that remain mean there
is no time to rest.
In the immediate term, there is the task of keeping Covid-19 in retreat while
simultaneously getting people whose care has been disrupted treated as quickly as
possible. But these urgent priorities must not divert attention away from the long-term
effort to combat the health inequalities that meant Covid-19 had such a disproportionate
impact on Solihull’s most vulnerable communities.
Andy Cave, CEO
We aim to make the effective use of patient and public experience, insight and
involvement central to the restoration and recovery of services. There are already
profound changes underway in how care is accessed and provided, and it is essential that
no-one’s needs are overlooked.
The restoration and recovery of services offers opportunities as well as challenges. The
new Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care System, with NHS, local authority and other
services working more closely together in the community, have the potential to
significantly improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities. Healthwatch Solihull will
champion Solihull to have an equal footing and voice as part of the Birmingham and
Solihull system.
Integrated Care Systems are designed to accommodate the specific needs of different
communities, something particularly important somewhere as diverse as Solihull. Solihull
is rightly proud of this diversity, yet many communities have suffered worse than others,
both before and during the pandemic. Care Home residents, bereaved men and multi faith
communities were just some of the communities we engaged with during lockdown, and
we will continue to reach out across the borough to understand and evidence where
inequality exists. The feedback we hear will provide support and challenge to health and
social care services so the needs of individuals from every background are considered in
plans to reduce inequality, and that everyone can access the best possible care for them.
Healthwatch Solihull is dedicated to three areas of work in the coming year (21-22):
1. Restoration and Recovery – ensuring patients are supported, communicated with
and prioritised fairly.
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2. Tackling Inequality – ensuring that those who are most likely to experience
inequality are at the heart of decisions and have their voice heard.
3. Championing Patients in the development of the Birmingham and Solihull
Integrated Care System.