Providing advice and information
If you need information about health or social care services or are having difficulties getting the support you need, Healthwatch Islington can point you in the right direction. Our information and advice service is one of our core statutory functions and has been helping Islington residents since our launch in 2013. Some of the issues that people come to us with are easy to resolve, but others can be complex, and we sometimes need to contact many different organisations and work over a period of weeks or even months to secure a satisfactory outcome. As of October 2023, we’ve handled over 2,150 cases.
It’s also one of the most important ways we hear feedback from the community about the state of local services. When we see a spike in enquiries about a particular service, it can be an early warning sign that the service isn’t working well. For example, a few months into the pandemic we started hearing from residents with dental issues who couldn’t get any treatment on the NHS. More and more people approached us with the same problem. There wasn’t enough dental provision to meet the need. Although it was a national issue that we could do little to affect, thanks to the feedback we got from residents we were able to help decision-makers in Islington understand how the situation was affecting local people. Our information and advice team was able to support many individuals who couldn’t find an NHS dentist, some with very high levels of need. Since residents started contacting us with this problem, we’ve been able to help over 150 people to access dental treatment.
Another example comes from 2019 when we started hearing from vulnerable service users who were no longer being offered patient transport for hospital appointments and community health services. A new provider was delivering the service and changes had been made to how eligibility criteria were being applied. We helped individual residents who were refused transport to successfully contest these decisions. We also pushed back against commissioners, calling for clearer eligibility criteria so patients were better able to challenge decisions when they were wrongly refused transport.
It’s also worth celebrating that, as your local health and care champion, our information and advice service goes the extra mile to support more vulnerable residents, those who find it harder to advocate for themselves. For example, Paul, an older resident with limited mobility and vision and many other health issues, was having difficulties last year getting a Telecare system installed. This was because the registered landlord providing his social housing was being unresponsive. Once we heard about the difficulties he was experiencing, we took up the baton on his behalf. Over a period of several months, our information and advice worker wrote nearly 30 emails, made over 40 phone calls, and was finally forced to submit a formal complaint, to get Paul the favourable outcome that was his due.
