News and reports

NHS and social care services only make the best decisions if they listen to the people they care for. Read our national partner Healthwatch England’s Annual Report to Parliament to see how your feedback has helped decision-makers prioritise what matters most.

What people have told us about health and social care
Find out in our quarterly Impact and Outcomes report how your feedback is helping NHS and social care services improve care in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay.

Nearly 85,000 people in Devon provide unpaid care, with one third (33.4%) providing more than 20 hours of unpaid care per week. To learn more about the experiences of unpaid carers and the impact of providing care at home, Healthwatch developed a survey in conjunction with Devon Carers, Improving Lives Plymouth, and the Torbay Carers Service. These organisations provide a range of support services to unpaid carers.

There are almost 370,000 people in employment in Devon, with the proportion of self-employed workers (14.7%) being higher than the national average (9.3%). The Covid-19 pandemic changed the way that many of us work; in spring 2022, 38% of working adults in the UK reported having worked from home at least once in the past seven days.

Healthwatch wanted to find out about the physical and mental impact of working from home, and how working from home has affected people’s work/life balance.

In May 2022, Healthwatch Plymouth were approached by the new provider of Mayflower Medical Group (MMG) to undertake a patient survey.

The survey’s focus was to address long established patient concerns and frustrations in accessing GP services at the 5 surgeries that form MMG and to ask for suggestions on generally improving the service and in particular improving access.

In May 2022, Healthwatch Plymouth were approached by the new provider of Mayflower Medical Group (MMG) to undertake a patient survey.

The survey’s focus was to address long established patient concerns and frustrations in accessing GP services at the 5 surgeries that form MMG and to ask for suggestions on generally improving the service and in particular improving access.

This Healthwatch England briefing discusses people’s experiences of urgent and emergency care (UEC) services from December 2020 to August 2022.

It mentions how Healthwatch in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay reported on four Emergency Departments across Devon in September 2021. At all four hospitals they found that people had gone to the emergency department because they could not access another service, such as the GP or NHS 111. In one visit to one of the emergency departments they found that over half (51%) of patients attending were there because they couldn’t see their GP.

In 2022, Healthwatch in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay held a series of meetings with the South West representative of the Royal Association for Deaf People to discuss various concerns that were being raised around access to British Sign Language (BSL) qualified interpreters. These concerns include:

• Interpreters to support appointments in hospital and GP surgeries
• Interpreters to support complaints process
• Access to information

What people have told us about health and social care
Find out in our quarterly Impact and Outcomes report how your feedback is helping NHS and social care services improve care in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay.

Each quarter you can find out:

which services people are telling us about
how people are feeling about health and care services
how Healthwatch are making a difference to care in your part of Devon
real life experiences people have shared through our website feedback centres
how we have helped people get the information they need, and the difference that has made
and how we are making a difference to our communities in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay.

You can download the report below for a details.

In 2021, Healthwatch Devon and North Dartmoor Primary Care Network (NDPCN) worked together to find out about the health and wellbeing needs of local people; mental health support was found to be particularly important to the community.

Following the 2021 engagement, NDPCN GP practices, health and social care partners, and other partners in the community, voluntary, and statutory sector wanted to find out more about people’s views on mental health services locally and Devon-wide.

You can download the report below for full details.

Healthwatch in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay (HWDPT) were asked by the NHS Devon Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to assist in running focus groups, to find out how elective care waiting lists have impacted patients and how people would like these waiting lists to be addressed.

Every patient on a waiting list for medical care (who had provided an email address and consented to being contacted) was invited by the CCG to register for an online focus group. Invites were also sent via the Devon Virtual Voices Panel, and through the Healthwatch Assist network. Eight virtual focus groups were held via Zoom between 9 March and 8 April 2022.

You can download the report below for full details.

Here is our Healthwatch in Devon, Plymouth and Torbay Annual Report for 2022, containing all of our statutory activities from April 2021 to March 2022 and more.