Agenda item

The Committee received the Healthwatch County Durham Annual Report 2023/24 (for copy of report, see file of minutes).

Gail McGee, Project Lead, Healthwatch County Durham was in attendance to present the report and deliver a presentation that provided details of the 2023-24 highlights and 2024-2025 priority areas (for copy of presentation, see file of minutes).

Councillor Earley asked about the responses in relation to the discharge of patients. He then referred to access to GP services and indicated that the ICB were doing a piece of work regionally on helping practices who had identified problems and asked if Healthwatch had followed that selection of practices or if this was independent in terms of interventions.

The Project Lead responded that the hospital discharge feedback was not positive, but they did usually only hear the bad stories. They were going to be following up on the recommendations made, most of which were practical with a lot around communications and the lack of understanding between different services which was an issue they hear a lot about.

The Strategic Head of Primary Care, North East and North Cumbria ICB indicated that there were a couple of national initiatives namely, the ‘One General Practice Programme’ and ‘The Primary Care Access Recovery Plan (PECARP)’. All 61 practices could receive funding to improve access to services in particular access to the GP cloud-based telephony system. He and Gail McGee regularly meet to share intelligence on practices. A lot of work was ongoing around improvement and a reform plan should be available in the next few months focusing on digital activity and prevention.

Councillor Hovvels highlighted the amount of work carried out by volunteers and asked that thanks was passed onto those volunteers.

The Project Lead indicated that they currently had around 25 volunteers in Healthwatch who contributed a huge amount to their work.

Councillor Lines asked if they received much anecdotal feedback from residents particularly from those in rural areas and increasingly in urban locations who are finding it more difficult to access GP services due to the reduction in frequency and coverage of bus services. He asked if this was the case does this get fed back to local and regional transport companies.

The Project Lead responded that they did not receive feedback on transport issues for GP practices it tended to be more around hospital appointments in particular early morning appointments. This was what had prompted them to produce a guide on patient transport services, public transport was more difficult for them to get involved with, but they had been asked to look at this alongside patient transport, but they were not sure on how much they could influence public transport.

Councillor Savoury congratulated the work of the team and indicated that she was impressed by the work carried out with the farming communities and stated it would be wonderful if it could be rolled out to the practice at Weardale.

The Project Lead responded that the Inclusion Lead was talking to all the rural farmers, and she would come back to Councillor Savoury on how this was progressing.

The Chair asked that a letter of thanks be sent from the Committee to Healthwatch County Durham.

Resolved: (i) That the contents of the report be noted.

(ii) That a letter of thanks be sent on behalf of the Adults, Wellbeing and Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee to County Durham Healthwatch and their team of volunteers for the work undertaken in the past year.