We want to hear your voice, showcase your experience in our Care Campaign

Background

In September 2020, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), Healthwatch England and local Healthwatch Lincolnshire launch a month-long focus encouraging people in England, with long term or invisible conditions to speak up about their or a loved one’s care!

The campaign also seeks to help understand the impact COVID-19 and the additional pressures placed on health and social care services. People with long-term health conditions are some of the most frequent users of health and care services and can be among the most vulnerable. However, we know they're also one of the best groups at feeding back on care – to know what services are working well and where care may need to be improved.

Research has shown us they are now less inclined to share their experience and we want to remind to people to continue to feedback on their care - or that of a loved one. Health and care services want more people to share their experiences so they can learn and find out how to help.

Through the campaign, we encourage people to feedback on care, both good or bad, as this information supports our ongoing monitoring of services. Everyone can play a part in improving care by directly giving feedback to services, and by sharing information and experiences with us so that we can act as well as highlight good care. We are keen to show stories from a diverse range of people.

The campaign aims to:

• Raise awareness of CQC, Healthwatch and the network, and how people can feedback about their care or that of a loved one
• Encourage people to share their experiences of care to support services to improve
• Encourage people to speak up when they have concerns with their care

How you can help

To support the campaign, we’re looking for people with long term or invisible illnesses who would be happy to share their recent experience of feeding back about care. We are looking for people with a range of experience including that as a parent, carer or advocate.

Experience could include:

• People who are in the process of, or have raised a recent concern about their care or a loved one – who wants to share their advice and tips with other people
• People who have raised a concern and about the care/a love one received which resulted in a positive impact and want to share the importance of speaking up – to help themselves/ loved one and others
• We are also interested to hear from any health and social care professionals who have had feedback shared with them and how that has helped improve service delivery.

Written stories

We’ll develop a shortlist of case study stories. If you are shortlisted, you will be interviewed, and a summary of your experience will be written up. This will be shared with you for approval and once approved, offered to magazines and other consumer media as supporting material. We would like to include photos to accompany each written piece. The campaign focus launches in September 2020 and runs throughout the year.

Filming

We would like people to film short video clips (1 minute) with talking about their experiences and advice for other people. We will support people to film these and shared edited films back for approval. Once approved, feature on the CQC and Healthwatch websites, shared on social media and with consumer media.

You can view how we can used case studies in previous campaigns here.