Update from our CEO

Your opinion, experiences and views made a genuine difference

1. Following our 2021 report “Putting good communications with patients at the heart of service change (November 2021)” we’ve pursued our recommendations, with University Hospitals Sussex Trust. They have taken our recommendation to create a patient charter on communications and incorporated this into their Patient First work and “Communication” is now one of three key themes which form part of their Patient Experience strategy 2022-25. It also forms part of their new self evaluation toolkit, “Welcome Standards: Excellence in Patient Services Self Evaluation framework”. This now means that the voice of the patient is now directly reflected in how the Trust will assess ‘good patient experience’.

2. In June 2022, Healthwatch worked with LGBT Switchboard to ask LGBTQ+ patients’ for their experiences of using health and social care services. We have worked with CQC to progress the findings based on your feedback. You can read the impact that your feedback has had here.

3. In case you missed it, we received an acknowledgement in the Sunday Times for our Hospital Discharge project – another accolade. Linked to this, Sussex has been chosen to be a national frontrunner to improve hospital discharge and we will be pushing to get our HOPS findings included as part of this work.

Our activity

You can read a short summary of our helpline (volunteer led) activity from October to December. An infographic summarising our overall activity during this period is also attached.

Our projects

1. Our latest GP access report is now available for you to read. Our Head of Research, Lester Coleman ran this pan-Sussex project and we have shared this with ICS leads and hospital Trust. Of concern is the high proportion of people who delayed making an appointment (over 50%) and that around one-in-ten sought alternative support from other NHS services as a result.

2. Maternity: we have submitted a new bid for funded maternity work and hope to be successful so that we can reach more communities. This work will be led by Michelle Kay (Project Coordinator).

3. Outpatients: We were recently successful in applying for funding to deliver a series of workshops with patients on proposed changes to outpatients. This work will also be led by Michelle Kay.

4. Dentistry. We’re running two simple dental surveys at present to see what, if any, improvements have happened since reforms affecting dentistry were announced in December. We’re also carrying out research of the NHS website to see if practices are meeting the new requirement to update their availability. The three Healthwatch teams in Sussex met with the Integrated Care System’s (ICS) lead for dentistry this month and are forging plans to work closer together. We’re once again working with a local MP to have raised questions in Parliament and we submitted a response to the Parliamentary Inquiry on dentistry that we will publish soon.

5. Will Anjos and Clary Collicutt (Project Coordinators) are continuing with our Homecare checks project (formerly Lay Assessors). Our volunteers are heavily involved in this. We submitted findings from our first series of interviews to the Council. We cannot publish these but will share an anonymised report soon. Overall, the feedback we received about people’s home care was good.

6. Lester Coleman is focusing on two projects: direct payments which seeks peoples’ experience of applying for this support and dementia pathways which will explore what the journey is like for those diagnosed with dementia and their loved ones and how this might be improved. Both projects involve Healthwatch Board members, Khalid Ali and Sophie Crowton. The projects will run until April/May at least. If you are interested in either project, please get in touch with Lester@hwbh.co.uk

In other work:

• We held a Volunteer Event in January and we’re delighted to see so many of you there. Thank you.

• We’re finalising our recruitment plans and are delighted to announce that Clary Collicutt has been promoted to Project Coordinator, starting soon.

• We’ve secured a regular slot at our city’s Health Overview Scrutiny Committee to discuss Healthwatch projects which provides an opportunity to discuss our work.

• We’re working with other Healthwatch teams to determine how we can support our ICS to deliver their 3 key priorities which are:

- Growing and developing our workforce

- Improving the use of digital technology and information

- Maximising the power of partnership working.

• We’re also starting work on developing a strategy for Healthwatch to describe our role over the next few years in supporting the ICS and health and social care system

Health and Social Care in the news

News from Healthwatch England

Patients and public need urgent reassurance on NHS winter crisis and recovery. Healthwatch England is concerned that the NHS is at breaking point and will exacerbate already low public confidence that people can get urgent and emergency care when they need it most. Research commissioned by Healthwatch England just prior to the winter period showed that over half of people (58%) agreed that their confidence levels in A&E had changed during the pandemic, with 72% saying it had fallen.

Changing behaviour in the cost of living crisis. Healthwatch England’s new data revealed in their recently published briefing shows a worrying increase in the number of people avoiding vital care. Their findings suggest people are increasingly avoiding NHS appointments and prescriptions, due to fear of extra costs. Healthwatch has called for urgent action from government and health and care services to ensure rising costs are not a barrier to healthcare. The number of people who avoided an NHS appointment due to the cost of travel doubled to almost one in 10, 11%, in December, up from 6% in October.

In December, due to the ongoing critical incident in Sussex health services, it was necessary to reschedule some non-urgent appointments. If your care is affected, you will be contacted. It was necessary to take this step to ensure services could continue to provide the safest possible care for local people. Partners worked together around the clock and put in additional measures across services and refocused our workforce in areas of most need. All of these actions meant the system is now in a more stable position. A number of measures in place, or are in the process of being put in place, to help manage the situation and ensure local people are getting the most timely and best care possible. These include:

• Increased focus on hospital discharges.

• Introducing virtual wards, where, with the help of new technologies such as wearable devices, patients are able to receive care, monitoring and treatment from home.

• Additional capacity for children with Strep A.

Leaked data shows long cancer waits at record heights with the number of people waiting for cancer diagnosis and treatment for more than three months passing 12,000 for the first time. NHS England figures for the week ending 1 January obtained by HSJ magazine show that more than 4 per cent of the 287,000 people on the Cancer Waiting Times Patient Tracking List had been referred more than 104 days previously. In response, NHS England pointed out that the “backlog” of those waiting more than 62 days – the national standard – was falling. Official data released by NHSE last month showed that September and October last year had been the worst months for patients breaching the 62-day cancer urgent referral target, surpassing the peak months of the first wave of the pandemic.

Our local hospital

In results of an annual maternity survey, patients have given positive feedback about their experience with University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust. The survey, run by the care quality commission, asked 21,000 women about their experience at 121 trusts across England. New mums were asked about all aspects of their maternity care, including ante-natal, labour and birth and post-natal care. The results show University Hospitals Sussex came ninth overall in a scoring system based on the feedback.

Liver scanning clinic cut waiting list by almost 90%. Patients are now seen more quickly following the successful introduction of weekend clinics.