Healthwatch Salford board meeting: What did i miss?

We were also joined by colleagues from across the city’s health and social care services to hear key updates, as well as members of the public.

If you missed it, you can watch the public element of the meeting online, or check out our key summary:

- Pennine Acute Hospital Trust (PAT)

Gavin Barclay from the Trust shared an update on the current consultation, which aims to gather views on the upcoming dissolution of Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (PAT) and the transfer of PAT sites and services to Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust (SRFT) and to Manchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

This means services previously operated by PAT that may be accessed by Salford residents - for example, residents living in eastern and northern parts of the city who access hospital services in Bury - will now be operated by SRFT.

The change is set to take place on 1^st April 2021, and the emphasis was on the message that the changes will not affect services for residents. Gavin said: “We are operating on an ‘as is’ basis immediately after the transfer takes place - meaning after 1^st April, we will maintain the existing services, delivering to existing patients, across existing locations.”

- Questions from the public

We asked Salford residents to share their questions about Healthwatch Salford with the board:

We were asked:  “Why should I share my feedback and experience of health and social care services in Salford with Healthwatch Salford?”

J Ahmed, board member, said: “I think the views of the people are vitally important to build a system that works for everyone. We are aware that we do need the voice of the public to be heard and the NHS very much is promoting coproduction and bringing people with lived experience into design and governance. There’s all sorts of reasons why now is a good time to start taking about what good health and social care services look like, and we’re best placed to listen!”

We were also asked: “What does being a board member involve and how do I apply?”

Kate Simpson, board member, said: “It involves having a say, looking at what Healthwatch Salford is doing and providing a bit of scrutiny and sometimes it’s just about providing a fresh pair of eyes and posing questions that you think the public might be interested in.”

We are currently recruiting for trustees to join our board - please visit our website if you’d like to learn more about this opportunity.

- Salford CCG are providing an accessible document on potential changes

Following our feedback, Salford CCG are putting together a simple and accessible document regarding the potential restructure of Salford CCG and other CCGs across Greater Manchester. We want to make sure every citizen in Salford can access and understand the changes made to their health and social care services. We will share the document once it is published.

- Chief Officer's update

Our Chief Officer, Alex Leach, shared the following key updates:

“Healthwatch England are developing a quality assurance framework- and the Healthwatch Salford board will be implementing this framework in 2021. The framework will help our team to review all of our ways of working, and we will make improvements where we feel they are needed and provide updates as we progress with this work.

In terms of service improvement, we’ve also been looking at our practices in terms of respect, inclusion, equality and diversity and we are pleased to announce we have been successfully accredited as an investor in diversity for small businesses.

We’ve continued our mission of championing the voices of people across Salford through a range of projects in 2020 and all of our reports from the past year can be found on our website.

We have had a busy start to the year as we seek to continue this mission in 2021: we have been promoting our Priorities Survey - if you haven’t already, please do complete this survey so that we understand which areas of health and care we should focus on and what you would like us to look at in more detail.”