News and reports

The Healthwatch network spoke to over 11,000 people about their experiences of primary care and found that, while people are generally very happy with the quality of their care, many people face a number of common problems accessing GP services. To get a deeper understanding of people’s experiences, we spoke to a number of patient groups, including people who are Deaf and hard-of-hearing, migrants, students, mothers of young children and over-65s.

We visited Aspray House on 12th February 2015.

We visited the Ross Wyld Care Home on 19th February 2015.

This report is a summary of the comments made by patients we met over a period of six weeks at the St James Medical Practice.

This report is the summary of the comments made by patients we met over a period of six weeks at the Hampton Medical Practice.

On 7th January 2015 seven young people took part in a discussion with the Local Authority Public Health team around proposals for a young people specific sexual health service in the borough. This report is a write up of those discussions, reflecting the comments and views expressed by young people on that day.

For one week, from 27 October 2014 – 1 November 2014 (this was also half term week) Healthwatch Waltham Forest attended Whipps Cross Hospital Emergency and Urgent Care Centre (EUCC) to undertake surveys with patients in the waiting area

This report reflects the discussions that took place at our GP services fit for the future event. It highlights issues such as those concerning service accessibility; information and communication; patient involvement; joined-up services; and complaints mechanisms (to name a few), and it also goes on to present features for ‘ideal GP services’ of the future in Waltham Forest.

We visited Parkview House on 2nd September 2014.

With the Stroke Association, we co-hosted a focus group on Friday 26th September 2014, to record stroke survivors’ views on their experiences of health and social care services as a whole.
The event was attended by around 15 service users and carers, plus stroke nurses from Whipps Cross Hospital. From the comments recorded, 185 issues have been identified.
This report identifies clear trends and offers suggestions on what could and should be improved, what is failing, and what is working well.

We visited Peartree House Care Home on 31st July 2014.

We visited St Catherine's Rest Home on 31st July 2014.