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>> ANNA BRADLEY: I'm Anna Bradley and I'm the Chair of Healthwatch England.
>> SHANA PEZARO: I'm Shana Pezaro, I'm 33, I live in Brighton, I have MS so I use a wide range of social
and healthcare services.
Anna I just wanted to ask you, why has Healthwatch been set up in the first place?
Well I guess one very important reason is because when we all use health and social
care services, and you'll know this yourself, you feel very vulnerable, you aren't
your normal, demanding self in the face of doctors and other cares, and so I think it's
one time in our lives when we really benefit from having someone who can speak for us on
occasion.
I think the other thing is that when we use those services, more often than not, we find
ourselves cut into pieces.
There's the bit of us which is dealing with the specialist for your own condition, say
MS, but then you have other health needs and other social care needs and you're carved
into lots of little pieces.
I think one of the things that Healthwatch is able to do is to start absolutely from
the position of the user of service, people as they are, who have a range of needs, rather
than being carved up into different sections.
And I guess the other thing is the really important decisions are made by people who
commission and deliver services, and they are quite big organisations, and you need
people to speak to them with really good evidence to persuade them to do things a bit differently,
and that's what Healthwatch will do locally and nationally.
I know that I very much have health and I have social care and it's brilliant that
I feel Healthwatch are bringing those two together to see me as a whole really.
Why do you think Healthwatch will make a difference?
Well, one of the most important things about Healthwatch is, whether it's at your local
level, or it's at a national level, we have, because of the way the legislation was set
up, a given role.
At the national level we can advise the Secretary of State on health and social care policy,
we advise all the regulators, and there are several, who work in this sector.
And the important thing about the advice we offer is they have to respond to it.
They don't have to act on it but they have to respond to it and say what they're doing,
and that gives a transparency to our conversations if you like, and that's very powerful I
think.
At the local level Healthwatch has a very similar arrangement.
So at the local level local Healthwatch will be sat on a thing called The Health and Well-Being
Board, which will be the place where the plan for what needs to be delivered by way of health
and social care in the area is developed, and they will have a similar role to the commissioners
and providers of service on what needs to be done and how. So it's an important position
for Healthwatch, which didn't exist in the previous arrangement.
How can we be sure that you are going to be an independent body, because you get money
from government to run Healthwatch and yet you also have to tell the government what
you think they're doing wrong?
So how will that work in terms of being independent from them?
Well I could give you lots of reasons why you should think we are going to be independent.
In terms of the way we have been set up- I was set up, appointed independently.
We've got our own committee to run the organisation.
We have our own director, our own staff, our own budget line from government. All of these
things should make sure we could be independent, but what will really make us independent is
the way that we behave, the way that we make decisions, the things that we say on behalf
of consumers and users of services.
And really the only people who can make that judgement will be people like yourself, and
we will have to win your confidence, to earn our stripes if you like by the way we do our
job over the course of the next period.
So what will you do if you find something is really wrong?
Well I think the people who are most likely to hear of something that's really wrong
are local Healthwatch, rather than Healthwatch England, because they are down there, on the
front line talking to those people who are using services, and indeed their carers.
And what will happen is they will have the opportunity to either to tell the local Care
Quality Commission Inspector, who works in the area, that there's something wrong,
and they will have to take account of that and feed it into the Care Quality Commission,
or they will tell us, and we will do the same.
It shouldn't matter who that person is who has got evidence of poor quality of care speaks
to.
What matters is that whoever they speak to it will go to the right place for something
to be done about it instantly, and we will do that, as will local Healthwatch.
How will you work with the local Healthwatch?
Well there'll be 152 local Healthwatchs, and each of them will be commissioned by a
different local authority.
So they'll all be slightly differently shaped.
What our task is is to make sure, together with all 152 of the local Healthwatch groups, combined with Healthwatch
England, we make a network, which allows us to learn from all of them, add the evidence
that they have together, so we get a really strong picture of what's happening to consumers
and users of services up and down the country.
But to do that we've got to persuade local Healthwatch that they
should want to work with us.
So one of the things we're thinking about really hard is what we can do to help them
do their job more easily- what resources they need, how we can help them to learn from each
other about the good things that are done in different places, just how we can make
their jobs easier really.
What about all the charities that are already doing a really good job, because a lot of
the work that needs to happen is already out there isn't it?
So how would Healthwatch avoid duplicating that?
Well simple answer, I guess, is by working with all those existing organisations because-
you know better than me- the MS Society knows a whole lot more about MS than Healthwatch
would ever know.
And we need to have, at national level, relationships with all those specialist organisations who
have really good evidence about the issues that affect the users of those particular
services, or users with particular sets of issues.
So we need to build that network, as well as having a network with local Healthwatch groups.
And local Healthwatch themselves also need to have really good relationships with the
local organisations, such as Age UK, Diabetes UK, and so on, all those user groups that
we know exist in local communities.
If Healthwatch was a big success what's the one thing that you'd have like to have
seen it achieve?
Well I think it's really important it is a big success.
There's an awful lot riding on this.
It's a great opportunity to make sure that services change for the better, and I guess that's
the thing I would want to know.
I don't yet have a clear picture of which things it is that Healthwatch should really
focus our energies on.
We are going to be spending a bit of time over the next six months really working that
out, understanding, for all the people we've talked about, what the issues are and what
our priorities should be.
But in, let's say eighteen months from now, a year into our real life, I would like people
who use health and social care services to be able to say about Healthwatch, ' Yeah,
they made a difference. We know they helped to make this change'.
And we will have to work out over the next period what those particular changes are.
That's great, and thanks you very much.
Thank you.