LPG5029 Healthwatch Tower Hamlets

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 requires each local authority to have in place a local Healthwatch organisation. This organisation has the following statutory duties:

1. Promoting and supporting the involvement of local people in the commissioning, the provision and scrutiny of local care services. 2. Enabling local people to monitor the standard of provision of local care services and whether and how local care services could and ought to be improved. 3. Obtaining the views of local people regarding their needs for, and experiences of, local care services and importantly to make these views known. 4. Making reports and recommendations about how local care services could or ought to be improved. These should be directed to commissioners and providers of care services, and people responsible for managing or scrutinising local care services and shared with Healthwatch England. 5. Providing information about local health and social care services to the public. 6. Formulating views on the standard of provision and whether and how the local care services could and ought to be improved; and sharing these views with Healthwatch England. 7. Making recommendations to Healthwatch England to advise the Care Quality Commission to conduct special reviews or investigations (or, where the circumstances justify doing so, making such recommendations direct to the CQC); and to make recommendations to Healthwatch England to publish reports about particular issues. 8. Providing Healthwatch England with the intelligence and insight it needs to enable it to perform effectively.

Tower Hamlets Council is committed to ensuring our Healthwatch can be an effective consumer champion for local people and achieve tangible changes in the health and social care system. The Mayor and Cabinet, following a review, have agreed an ambitious new model for Healthwatch Tower Hamlets (HWTH), which draws on best practice and builds on the local achievements of our current provider.Going forward, HWTH will:

• Carry out the statutory functions outlined above; • Be a corporate body, embedded in local communities; • Reach out proactively to the full range of diverse communities in Tower Hamlets, enabling local people to have their voice heard; • Act as local consumer champion representing the collective voice of local people (meaning patients, service users, carers and the public), on the borough’s Health and Wellbeing Board; • Play an integral role in the preparation of the local statutory Joint Strategic Needs Assessment and joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy on which local commissioning decisions will be based; • Have real influence with commissioners, providers, regulators and Healthwatch England using their knowledge of what matters to local people; • Achieve tangible changes (both small-scale and strategic) to local health and social services, through holding the system to account and identifying solutions to problems; and • Support individuals to access information and indepe