What we'll be working on next...

Learning disabled supported living and young people's take-up of pharmacy services are just two of the areas of health and social care our team will be looking at over the next 12 months.

Our priorities for 2019-20 were decided at a meeting of our Healthwatch County Durham Board in January. All the items selected were proposed due to intelligence our signposting service has received from patients and the public or were requests from organisations to help them gather independent service user feedback.

The final list of priorities for 2019-20 includes:

• NHS 10 Year Plan – we will be gathering people’s views on the NHS 10 Year Plan and its priorities to feed into a national Healthwatch England project.
• Young people accessing pharmacy services – we will be working with the Local Pharmaceutical Committee to help develop a strategy that encourages more young people to access pharmacy services. The idea for such a strategy originated in our report into pharmacy services.
• Enter and View – we will continue to offer GP practices, care homes, hospital wards and departments the opportunity to request an Enter and View visit from our team, where we gather independent service user feedback to identify good practice and learning points.
• Learning disabled supported living – we will continue to gather feedback from residents in supported living homes where the support has been outsourced to a private provider by the council, to find out how services are following the transfer. This work is being carried out on behalf of commissioners of adult social care.