The Rt Hon. Lord Hunt of Kings Heath OBE visits Healthwatch Birmingham

Shadow Spokesman for Health ‘enormously impressed’ on visit to Healthwatch Birmingham.

The Rt Hon. Lord Philip Hunt of Kings Heath OBE maintains a keen interest in the role and performance of Healthwatch and as a resident of Birmingham, Healthwatch Birmingham is his local Healthwatch. In advance of Lord Hunt addressing Questions to the Prime Minister about Healthwatch, we recently invited Lord Hunt to meet with us to find out more about the progress we’re making to use people’s experience of using health and social care services as levers for improvement.

Last week the Shadow Spokesman for Health and Shadow Deputy Leader of the House of Lords and our CEO Candy Perry met in our offices at Fiveways. The 90 minute meeting covered a huge amount including:

• Early impact of our new strategy for listening out for avoidable health inequity caused by local policy decisions.
• Devolution in Birmingham which doesn’t currently include health and social care but must be encouraged to consider people’s health and social care needs in Birmingham to prevent unintended health inequity.
• The challenges of being a consumer champion and watchdog trying to be an effective part of a complex scrutiny and quality assurance system in a complex health and social care system – as a small corporate body with statutory powers.

The Rt. Hon. Lord Hunt said he:

“…was enormously impressed by your work and in particular your focus on the whole system in Birmingham.”

Candy Perry said:

“Our whole Birmingham health and social care system is going to continue to experience change at an unprecedented rate fuelled by growing demand and decreasing budgets,  and now also by recently announced changes to the leadership at Birmingham City Council and last week’s Government Spending Review. Lord Hunt was very encouraging of our role and progress and it was a pleasure to be able to share our work with him.”

Have your say on how all this change is actually affecting your access to high quality health and social care services – good and not so good, by emailing us at info@healthwatchbirmingham.co.uk