How is Healthwatch Brent making a difference?
Healthwatch Brent is your local health and social care champion, helping people across the borough raise their voices about the issues that matter to them. But what have we actually achieved over the past year? Our annual report was published today, and gives you the opportunity to look deeper at our work.
Our year in numbers
1197 people shared their experiences of health and social care services, helping raise awareness of issues and improve care
1210 people came to us for clear advice and information about topics such as mental health and the cost-of-living crisis
10 reports were published sharing local perspectives on key issues, and sharing our findings from Enter & View visits.
22 volunteers and 4 members of staff made all this work possible.
How we act on your experiences
Everything Healthwatch does is based on the needs of our local communities. We set our priorities based on what you tell us is most important and share your views with local service providers so they can improve. This year our work has focused on core issues such as mental health and access to primary care.
One of our biggest areas of work has been evaluating quality and equality of care in local maternity services. We found that 80% of women had a positive experience of giving birth, across North West London. However, this dropped to only 58% of women who’d had a positive experience after giving birth. We’ve made recommendations such as improving the information that women receive after birth and giving more personalised breastfeeding support, to help improve this for all birthing parents.
The annual report also dives into our work with Almis Association, supporting Somali people living in Brent to learn more about mental health and access vital services. Throughout the project, 160 people attended drop-in sessions about mental health services and 120 people attended community training sessions. We will look to build on this work in the coming year so that Somali people living in Brent feel empowered to respond to mental health challenges.
Download the full annual report to read more about this work, as well as the other important projects we ran throughout the year.
Where do we go next?
There’s still plenty to do in our mission to make sure local people can have a say about their health services and receive an excellent standard of care. Some of our priorities this year include hospital discharge, experiences of accessing adult social care and hospital discharge. You can read more about the priorities we set earlier this year here. Or if you want to influence our future priorities, why not complete this short survey to tell us what you think about local services.
