About Us
Our Mission
Healthwatch Surrey champions the voice of local people to shape, improve and get the best from NHS, health and social care services.
Our Vision
- Healthwatch Surrey is the respected, trusted and credible champion of the consumer for health and social care in Surrey.
Goal: To have the relationships and structure in place to enable us to be trusted by all of our stakeholders, allowing us to collect experiences from local people and feed it back to the relevant parts of the system. We will be persistent in seeking outcomes and measuring our impact.
- Healthwatch Surrey’s role, function and services are known, understood and valued by local people who therefore readily contact us when they need us.
Goal: To have a simple, widely understood identity and mission, ensuring that at the time when people may benefit from contacting Healthwatch Surrey, they know who we are and what we do, can find and interact with us easily and, where appropriate, share their need and/or experiences with us.
- Our influencing is based on sound knowledge of local issues and the insight and experiences of local people.
Goal: To acquire evidence, knowledge and insight that reflect local people’s experiences of services in Surrey whilst ensuring that we actively seek out insight from seldom heard or hard to reach groups.
- We continue building our use of volunteers
Goal: To grow the number of volunteers at Healthwatch Surrey and to continue to develop the different volunteering roles.
How we work
As an independent statutory body, we have the power to make sure decision makers listen to the experiences of local people.
We passionately believe that listening and responding to local people’s experiences is vital to create health and social care services that meet the needs of people in Surrey. We seek out people’s experiences of health and care services, particularly from people whose voices are seldom heard, who might be at risk of health inequalities and whose needs are not met by current services. We share our findings publicly and with service providers and commissioners to influence and challenge current provision and future plans.
We also provide reliable and trustworthy information and signposting about local health and social care services to help people get the support they need.
What we do
We:
- Champion public and user involvement in decision making and design of services
- Enable people to share views and concerns about local health and social care services
- Provide evidence based feedback to commissioners and providers to influence, inform and, if necessary, challenge decisions and plans
- Provide, or signpost to, information about local services and how to access them
- Provide feedback to Healthwatch England and the Care Quality Commission
- Produce reports and recommendations to influence the way services are designed and delivered
- Offer advocacy support for complaints about NHS services.
Who governs us?
The Healthwatch Surrey service is run by Luminus Insight CIC, known as Luminus.
CIC is a “community interest company” which is a special form of non-charitable limited company, which exists primarily to benefit a community or with a view to pursuing a social purpose, rather than to make a profit for shareholders.
The Directors of Luminus Insight CIC Board hold overall accountability for all our services, including our Healthwatch Surrey service. Our Board meets in public on a quarterly basis. Our Local Healthwatch Advisory Group help advise and support our Healthwatch Surrey Contract Manager and our team on what priorities we work on and how we use our statutory powers.
How we make decisions as a local Healthwatch is covered by our Decision Making Policy.
Collectively the Board of Directors guarantee the independence of Healthwatch Surrey and provide assurance that the community’s interest is being served at all times by our activity.
If you have any questions about Healthwatch Surrey, please visit our FAQs page.