Lynn Cawley, Chief Officer, Healthwatch Shropshire will give a verbal update.

The Board received an update from the Chief Officer Healthwatch.  She reported that just before Christmas they had received some good news when they were told that they had been successful in maintaining their contract for the next three years, which was really great news.  She explained that they were a very small charity of just four full time equivalent members of staff and the current economic situation meant that, like so many other charities and small organisation, were going to struggle over those three years to do what, as a statutory organisation, they were set up to do and so were going to have to look at income generation and looked to their partners to support them to do their work, to hear and bring the voices of the public to these discussions.  As they were not a fundraising organisation, they would really need to look at how they could generate more income over the period of the contract.

She reported that 2023 marked the 10^th Anniversary of Healthwatch being set up nationally and it was hoped there would be some celebration were they get to highlight the work they have been doing over the last 10 years and would feed into their annual event.  The previous years’ annual event was around end of life and bringing together all the work they had done around people’s experiences of end-of-life care and also work with the ICB (was CCG) to promote the end-of-life strategy that had been developed.  She requested that people let her have any thoughts or ideas about how to use the annual event this year.

The Chief Officer informed the Board that she would be bringing a report to a future meeting about the Accessible Information Standard and people’s right to access clear and understandable information.  Although a similar piece of work was undertaken in 2017, it was concerning that there was still a large part of the population who do not know their rights.  She stressed that for organisations it was everyone’s duty to tell people what their rights are, the onus was not on the individual to ask for their rights to be met.

They had also been asking about people’s experiences of calling for an ambulance in an emergency and had hoped to bring a report to this meeting however she was waiting for providers and commissioners across the system to share with her the work they had been doing to try to address this issue in order for the public to see the steps that were being taken.

Finally, she informed the Board about the launch of a Healthwatch England national campaign called ‘Because we all care’ which was trying to encourage more people to share their experiences of health and social care in order to highlight what was working, what could be improved and how things could be working better for people.  They would also be looking at their Forward Plan for 2023/24 and aligning it with the priorities of the system.  She requested that if anyone had any thoughts around some focussed work that they could undertake to speak to her and she would take it to the Healthwatch Board to agree.