December 2020 COVID-19 Insight Report
Download (PDF 214.93 KB)Summary of report content
Healthwatch Greenwich collected feedback from Dementia Carers Support, Remark!, and Deaf Multilingual Community Support about people's experiences of accessing health and care services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
They found that people experiences long delays on the phone to GP surgeries. In some instances, particularly for blood tests, service user’s give up trying to get through on the phone and just turn up, without booking an appointment. For deaf patients, GPs and other medical professionals did not always accept interpreters without vocal permission from the service user before they will speak to a third party (interpreter). Deaf service users were reluctant to seek treatment if a hospital, doctor, or dentist cannot provide a British Sign Language (BSL) interpreter for the appointment.
No recommendations were made in this report.