Reaching out to our local community
We strive to make sure we hear from as wide a range of our diverse community as possible. We want to tell the people who make decisions and change things about the experiences everyone has with health and care services.
We understand that factors such as culture, location, wealth, education, environment and discrimination can lead to worse health outcomes, and we support the strong consensus that this must change. At Healthwatch Waltham Forest, we stand ready to help by doing more to amplify the voices of communities that go unheard and reduce the barriers they face.
What does good care look like to local people?
We went out into the community to ask local people what good health and care means to them. We took what they told us and started to identify themes; these themes eventually developed into four pillars of good care.
Impact
- The Good Care Framework is now an accepted structure against which strategic plans are measured in order to understand if they are meeting what local people want from health and care.
- the Promoting Wellbeing programme partners from within the local authority, the NHS, and the voluntary and community sector have set themselves the task of addressing the Good Care principles within their five priorities: 1) Strengthening partnerships with the voluntary and community sector, 2) maximising employment support, 3) mental health promotion, 4) housing and health and 5) making the best use of primary care spaces.
- when services are being contracted potential providers need to outline how their service will meet these principles and they will then be measured against them
- the NEL ICB have agreed the principles as one of five key success measures
