Long Term Plan Kent & Medway Report
Download (PDF 345.87 KB)Summary of report content
NHS England published the NHS Long Term Plan (LTP) in January 2019. Together with their STP, Healthwatch Kent & Healthwatch Medway agreed to focus on children and young peoples’ services. They engaged with 297 people across the area via face-to-face or online survey as part of the network-wide LTP project.
The findings in the report include that people wanted their views & experiences taken seriously by health professionals, they wanted to be involved in decisions about them and that gaps and inconsistency in the services they used matters most to them. People said that the community midwifery team in Medway and access to Sexual Health clinics across Kent and Medway worked well for them. Also, children who were entitled to free dental care, visited an NHS dentist. The top three areas for improvement included waiting times to access mental health services, for young carers to be taken seriously in decision making and special clinics for young people for advice & information.
The report gave six recommendations to improve services for children and young people and contains a response from the Kent and Medway STP.