People's Service User Experiences - June 2019
We would like to remind stakeholders that our communications with you emanate from February 2013, when Sir Francis Keogh produced his review of the Mid Staffordshire Enquiry. Within this report Keogh cited a number of failings of the system and under the reforms, local Healthwatch is intended to be the local consumer voice with a key role in influencing local services. In both Winterbourne and Mid Staffs the patient voice and the voices of others within the system were not acted upon causing patient suffering and harm, as a local Healthwatch we must continue to raise and challenge the issues raised with us.
This report has been produced by Healthwatch Lincolnshire (HWL) to highlight the health and care experiences shared with us for the period 1 to 30 June 2019 where 166 comments raised.
Prominent areas of interest came under the topics of:
- Lack of communication between services, leaving patients anxious and concerned about their health and care continuity.
- Access to, and availability of appointments particularly within primary care.
- Concerns related to staffing levels within home care.
- Lack of mental health consideration and understanding from professionals.
- Number of comments related to pharmacy, and in particular late or missing items.
- Also we are more frequently seeing families coming to us where there is a dispute between social care services and themselves, relationships declining and the family feeling the actions are not in the best interest of the ‘patient/resident’ and not in collaboration with family or carers.
We note that all of the above issues are taken at face value and there is limited detail to the whole picture, however where a patient or loved one has taken the time to share their views or experiences with us we feel it is important to share these in the best interest of the health and care system.
It is also worth recognising the number positive comments within this report, 73 out of 162 (4 signposting have been removed), equate to around 45% of patients spoken to having a comment or experience which was categorised as a complement, in such challenging times for many of our services and the people who work within them, this is encouraging to see.
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If you need this report in a different format, please email info@healthwatchlincolnshire.co.uk or call 01205 820 892.
