Healthwatch Ealing April to June Engagement Report 2019

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 will cover a summary of the feedback that we have collected through engagement activities this quarter. This will include feedback from our focus groups – both are covered fully in separate reports which are available on request and online once. Feedback from our engagement with carers at Avenue house and from the Tracker we have kept to document all feedback that we have heard through ad-hoc engagement – this quarter the majority is from outpatients at Ealing hospital.

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.

We have been to 17 engagement meetings and events this quarter, not including collecting survey responses for the NHS Long-term plan engagement. As a part of the NHS Long Term Plan engagement, we went to Ealing Hospital outpatients most afternoons and to a few of the local surgeries and mental health services in order to fill out the survey, eventually collecting 250+ responses. Additionally, we held 2 focus groups to fulfill the criteria of the engagement, one a general focus group and another specifically about mental health services.