Healthwatch Lambeth is here to ensure your voice counts
With various changes happening in Lambeth’s health and social care, there may be things that directly affect you or your community, and times where you want to share your views outside of the Lambeth Together public events or consultations. Healthwatch Lambeth is the independent champion for all local people, and they work closely with Lambeth Together to ensure everyone’s voice is heard. They also share information and signpost people, if you are unsure of how to get around Lambeth’s health and social care system.
If you want to share your views about health and social care changes, or have questions, please get in touch with Healthwatch.
You can email them at info@healthwatchlambeth.org.uk, telephone them on 02072748522, or text 07545211283. You can also give anonymous feedback online.
Here is some of the work Healthwatch are doing to gather Lambeth people’s feedback, in order to help Lambeth Together better meet everyone’s needs:
a) Making sure new home care services put people more in control
Up until December, Healthwatch are looking at home care services funded by Lambeth Council, and want to hear from people who use this service. Lambeth is changing the way this service will be run, and wants to find ways for home care to be more joined up with other services, so that people can feel more in control of their life. This feeds into the work of Lambeth Together’s Neighbourhood Health and Wellbeing Alliance, creating more locally based services.
Do you use home care services, or know someone who does?
If you would like to speak to Healthwatch about this, please get in touch with Kate at kate.damiral@healthwatchlambeth.org.uk or call 02070955764.
b) Improving Early Help for families and children in Lambeth
Lambeth Council’s “Reframing Early Help Programme” aims to improve the Early Help offer to enable children and families, to enable high quality, whole-family support as soon as a family or child is identified as needing some support. It is important because spotting a problem early on in a family is better for the parents and the child, allowing them to receive the needed support to address problems before they become more serious.
Healthwatch has just finished evaluating the pilot for this programme in Streatham, in partnership with Lambeth Council and Lambeth Made. They found positive results including improvement in the relationships between partners working in Children’s Services, better whole family engagement and use of community resources to ensure sustainable support, and effective outcomes for families.
Some recommendations were also made based on learning from the pilot to further develop the model, build capacity and collaboration among partners, and ensure support is based on families’ needs rather than standardised thresholds. The pilot was largely successful and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the model could be used borough wide once the recommendations in this evaluation report are taken up.