Healthwatch Ealing Mental Health Focus Group Report

With growing pressure on the NHS – people living longer, more people living with long-term conditions, lifestyle choices affecting people’s health – changes are needed to make sure everybody gets the support they need. This includes making it easier to access support closer to home and via technology, doing more to help people stay well, and providing better support for people with long-term health conditions. 

Healthwatch Ealing decided to conduct one of the focus groups on mental health services in Ealing, which was held at the Solace Centre. Additionally, we collected experiences through one-on-one interviews at CAPE, another mental health service in the borough.

This report outlines the feedback given to Healthwatch Ealing by local mental health service users about what works, what does not work, what can be improved, what matters most, and how people want to be engaged. This engagement work resulted in feedback about specific services in the borough and overarching themes, such as ‘communication’.

In this report, we take a more detailed look at the feedback emerging from discussions. When talking to mental health service users they gave feedback on specific services and providers. They discussed what they thought were the problems with those services and what was working well. These issues have been highlighted in this report.

Next steps

• The report has been shared with CAPE for feedback purposes.

• A follow-up event is in the works to update service users on what has currently been happening and to, ideally, facilitate direct discussion between service providers and service users.
• NWL transformation event for mental health - fed into this with the report responses.
• Meeting with a transformation event lead to feedback on all our research (follow-up from the general event).
• Reports are finalised across NWL - and discussed with the CCGs.
• Healthwatch England are looking at data nationally to feedback on the Long-Term Plan.