Annual Report 2016/17

Healthwatch Salford report on its key achievements for 2016/17.  It:

• Influenced children and young people’s mental health services by engaging 411 young people and ensuring the findings were reflected in the refreshed CAMHS Transformation Plan, the 0–25 Integration Programme and increased emotional wellbeing support in schools. 
• Took a leading role on mental health across Greater Manchester, ensuring local engagement findings informed the Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership and contributing to improvements in access to psychological services through work with the mental health trust. 
• Helped shape the redesign of home care services in Salford by leading engagement with service users, carers and frontline staff, ensuring their experiences informed future commissioning and service design.
• Influenced strategic work on dementia by bringing together people living with dementia, carers and professionals, with local recommendations feeding into dementia-friendly and age-friendly city programmes and wider locality planning. 
• Improved patient participation in primary care by supporting the development of a framework for GP Patient Participation Groups at practice, neighbourhood and city-wide level. 
• Helped improve non-emergency patient transport services at Salford Royal Hospital following a mystery shopping exercise, leading to the introduction of pager alerts and improved systems for identifying and supporting patients awaiting transport. 
• Influenced national policy by feeding the experiences of 96 carers into the development of the Department of Health’s new Carers’ Strategy and contributing local mental health and service-user perspectives to national work by the CQC.