Tell Us North provides community engagement, research, evaluation, and assessment services within the fields of health, wellbeing, and social care. However, their best-known role is to run Healthwatch Newcastle and Healthwatch Gateshead which work to ensure social care and health commissioners and providers listen to the views of their local communities to seek continuous improvements to their services.
Here, Yvonne talks about the past year and looks forward to the joint Annual Public Meeting of Healthwatch Newcastle and Healthwatch Gateshead.
What does Healthwatch do?
We are the independent voice for people from Newcastle or Gateshead who use health and social care services. This could include a visit to a GP, a dentist, hospital, or a care home. We will listen to anyone who wants to share their experiences both good and bad about health and social care servcies.
Your annual report is just out. What are its main points?
We have carried out several reports over the past year they include people’s experience of the North East Ambulance Service, Care, Special Educational Needs and Disability Services.
Locally we have worked with the views of young people particularly regarding social isolation and loneliness and how they feel about living in Gateshead and Newcastle. That was quite insightful, and we have launched Youth Watch so that we can hear the voices of young people between 16 and 25 because their voices aren’t naturally heard through the current system.
In Gateshead we have done a lot of work around caregivers and their experiences of being part of the unpaid care services. Their experiences are very important, and we’ve made sure that commissioners and people who run the services have heard what they have had to say so that they can make positive changes.
We also work with other Healthwatch areas on research and earlier this year Healthwatch England brought the evidence of 27 local Healthwatch (including Newcastle and Gateshead) together a report which was presented in parliament to the Health and Social Care Committee as written evidence for its inquiry into dentistry.
Where is the report available?
Both the annual reports for Healthwatch Gateshead and Healthwatch Newcastle are available to download on our website. They are in an easy-to-understand accessible format and they are also available through our social media channels. If anyone wishes to have a paper copy, they just need to contact us.
Tell us about your Annual Public Meeting?
We are having a joint Annual Public Meeting of both Healthwatch Gateshead and Healthwatch Newcastle on 28th September at 1pm in MEA House, Newcastle. The aim is to bring people together so that they can hear what we have been doing, but more importantly look at what we’re going to be doing in the future. We’ve a number of emerging priorities coming forward for 2023/24 including things like hospital discharge, access to GP’s, mental health, health literacy, accessible information standards and social care.
Can anyone attend?
Yes, we are inviting the public to come along and help us celebrate what we’ve done in the last 12 months but also to look ahead to the future. We’d welcome people’s experiences, and we would love to share our plans for the future.
We’re providing light refreshments, so it would be helpful if people could let us know that they are coming by calling the office Freephone: 0808 178 9282 or 08000 385 116 between the hours of 09:00 – 16:00 Monday to Friday or booking via our Eventbrite page www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/658331305657