Healthwatch set up to fail?
Two important documents have been published by the Department of Health which focus on the role of Healthwatch England.
The first is a ‘Healthwatch Narrative’ which explains the thinking behind the establishment of Healthwatch England and provides the context for the second which is a consultation on the composition of the Healthwatch England Committee.
The Healthwatch narrative.
This starts with an assertive justification of Healthwatch England.
Note – 3 overhauls in the last 9 years. This is a service whose role relies on a strong relationship with citizens!
It goes on to say that LINKs have encountered a number of issues (I paraphrase):
- no national body to provide leadership
- they have tended to be unrepresentative
- there has been too much variation and insufficient peer support
- they lack a profile and have no consistent identity which has hindered success and reach
We don’t take citizen led improvement seriously enough
If the above analysis is correct then why have local commissioners and PCTs and their national bodies – LGA, Strategic Health Authorities and NHS Confederation consistently failed to address this deficit?
This is probably because local commissioners have seen the contribution of LINKs and its predecessor CPPIH as marginal to improving the quality of services and therefore not worth bothering about.
I think that the current paradigm for quality and improvement drivers probably looks a bit like this:
LOCAL DRIVERS FOR QUALITY AND IMPROVEMENT
More problems
The establishment of a national Healthwatch Committee is clearly an attempt to address this weakness. However there are further challenges. Here are three:
First – Remit
The summary list of Healthwatch pathfinders came out in October 2011. This lists the topics chosen by the 75 Healthwatch pilots – the diversity of interests and variation in focus is tremendous. This is despite the fact that leadership for most of the pilots rests with local authorities rather than with LINKs – so we might reasonably expect strong strategic direction.
While it could be argued that this diversity reflects local priorities and agendas it is as likely to be an indicator of:
- a lack of engagement at a strategic level in local government – leading to a lack of strategic focus for the HealthWatch pilot
- a mismatch between the scale of the Healthwatch role and the resources currently available – leading to a lack of clarity about mission
- a lack of connection with other approaches to engage citizens at a local level – leading to a siloed approach to an issue that is should be central to all of us – health and wellbeing.
- A reluctance to move from the improvement paradigm I have described above to one that places a greater emphasis on citizen led accountability.
Second – Everything and Nothing
The Healthwatch transition plan identifies Local Heathwatch as the ‘local consumer voice for health and social care’ and sets out its remit as:
- Influencing – help shape the planning of health and social care services
- Signposting – help people access and make choices about care
- Advisory – Advocacy for individuals making complaints about healthcare.
However elsewhere in the literature we also see reference to:
- (Inspection?) – ‘it will also have a remit for adult soial care services including rights to entry to premises where care services are provided’ (page 13 transition plan)
- Public Health ‘local Healthwatch has a role in promoting public health, health improvements and in tackling health inequalities (page 7 DH Narrative)
- Accountability – ‘through Healthwatch, people will be able to hold the new system to account’ (Healthwatch narrative – page 13)
There is a real risk of role confusion, being spread too thin, losing strategic focus etc. Healthwatch has to:
- Signpost people to health and social care services
- Come up with sensible challenge on the quality of health and social care services
- Be an advocate for public health, health improvement and public health.
The danger is that the wicked issues where we have made least progress – public health, health inequalities – will continue to be poorly served and the more traditional areas – right to entry etc will get more attention.
This challenge is not specific to Healthwatch – other advocacy organisations such as Citizens Advice know all about this struggle to get the balance right between responding to individual need and making an impact on policy at a local level – and Citizens Advice has a narrower remit than Healthwatch!
Third – Incorporation
Appropriately DH has chosen to keep the local authority scrutiny function separate from the remit of the Health and Wellbeing Board. This will lessen conflict of interest and the risk of incorporation.
Yet Healthwatch has a statutory place on the Health and Wellbeing Board. At one level this seems reasonable – an ambition by government for an inclusive and co-produced approach – it feels like a validating quick win for new local Healthwatch. However, membership of the Board brings formal and informal accountability to this group. It has real potential to limit the room for manouvre of local Healthwatch – making it harder to articulate in public a view that is independent of the Health and Wellbeing Board.
This tension is described in more detail in a good piece by Professor Jonathan Davies on the NCIA Website (For Insurgency: The Case against Partnership : Independent Action)
So, legislators may feel that they have assurred a positive, welcoming and inclusive seat for Healthwatch on the Health and Wellbeing Board but their positive intentions could actually be seen instead as rather naive policy making – coming before sound design; constraining local authorities and risking weakening the impact of Healthwatch rather than strengthening it.
It would have been better for Healthwatch to have a clear remit to support and strengthen local authority overview and scrutiny arrangements which are generally poorly resourced.
What Local Authorities can do
The role of Local Authorities is key here – they will commission the new service. They face a very tough environment and urgently need resources that will help them engage with citizens to defend good local services, challenge services that are not performing and in particular promote a community led – as opposed to clinician led health and wellbeing delivery model.
A good local authority will commission a Healthwatch service that is able to clearly articulate the view of citizens even if these may sometimes feel uncomfortable for local government.
Commissioning arrangements that bring Healthwatch closer to working with scrutiny committees would be strong.
Using some Healthwatch resources to build citizen led intelligence functions and capacity building would also help – as I set out in an an earlier blog on this subject.
There are strong lessons from a diverse range of sources such as:
Constructive Challenge – Citizens Advice, the Tenants Movement, DH National Support Teams about how to bring constructive challenge.
Building Capability of Citizens – LMU Institute for Health and Wellbeing, Altogether Better England, Workers Education Association
What DH and Healthwatch England can do
The creation of a dynamic, independent and challenging organisation is not going to be determined by deciding who sits in which deckchair.
There are a wide range of examples within the voluntary and community sector of how relationships between national and local bodies can bring innovation and energy as well as trouble and destruction.
The Department of Health and CQC should urgently hold some tight discussion groups with organisations who have long experience of managing the relationship between local organisations and a seperate national one. Organisations which operate a federated structure with a strong citizens base have a lot to offer such as:
What do you think?
A PDF of this blog is available here: healthwatch discussion paper
Reading this blog, it does seem as though the new local Healthwatch is too wide. However I rather hope that, whatever else emerges, any future local Healthwatch will typically have a role in highlighting the kind of health inequalities outlined by the Marmot report. This might mean no more than giving headline information on a local Healthwatch website while focusing the day to day work on patient advocacy and helping plan health and social care services.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if the new Healthwatch wasn’t created in the likeness of the formal system it is aiming to challenge but that instead it reflected in it’s shape, processes and approach something more dynamic, flexible and organic reflecting instead the communities it is supposed to represent.
This of course would take more resources, more release of control and power but the rewards in terms of more active citizenship and ownership, improved intelligence and increased energy and enthuisasm for health and well-being and services would be worth it!
How could we do this? Not sure but for starters, how about a national tender for development of healthwatch perhaps like the ‘Community Organisers’ programme, secondly how about taking models like Altogether Better’s evidence based model to train and support new Community Health Champions in communities with the highest health and well-being risks so their voice and knowledge can be heard. And why can’t local Healthwatch with their army of Community Health Champions also be charged with helping to co-produce solutions with the more formal aspects of the local health and well-being system.
Healthwatch could make a transformation difference if the people and sector it is supposed to be aimed at can be given the power to build, shape and deliver it with creative freedom.
Thanks Mark, very interesting and informative, especially as I have a class on ‘consumer’ involvement in health on Friday! You make some excellent points about power and direction /lack of them.
Reading through some of the material, my main impression was that they recognised the disruption to processes /effectiveness/commitment of the continual chopping and changing of bodies and their remit (LINks, CPPIH, and back… ). So they have decided to tackle this by, errrr.. changing it all again. They do continually assert they will be ‘building on’ the expertise etc. of LINks rather than chucking it out. However, whilst knowing little about the mechanisms in local govt etc. this begs the question for me, why not choose to shift the remit of LINks (and increase their powers – another claim for HealthWatch is that it will ‘have teeth’), rather than completely reform? It was my impression that many LINks have not actually been up and running very long.
For me it is also counterintuitive to claim a wider public health, care, services remit, whilst changing the semantic focus from ‘local’ to ‘Health’-watch.
Its interesting Kate – I detect a shift in approach over the last few weeks – with a move away from a more managed transition from LINKs to a more assertive re-tendering. I think this is reflected in some of the recent documentation that has come out from DH.