Listening, Supporting, Improving: How Healthwatch Wirral is Making a Difference

News - 04 June 2025

Each month, Healthwatch Wirral continues its commitment to putting people’s voices at the heart of health and care. From listening to individual concerns to supporting system-wide collaboration, our team work across the borough to ensure residents feel heard and supported.

We engage with thousands of people every year, through meetings, outreach, events, and one-to-one conversations, including nearly 1.500 people just in April.

Here’s some of our highlights from the past month, which gives you a flavour of the important work we carry out to ensure the voice of Wirral people is heard by decision-makers:

  • Attending meetings alongside the Local Authority, local & regional NHS partners, Primary Care Networks, public health teams, and community groups.
  • Carrying out outreach visits, including Enter & View visits, visits to local GP practices and distributing information across the community.
  • Supporting individuals through direct one-to-one conversations.
  • Listening to concerns people share with us – ranging from care & treatment and waiting times to difficulties with digital systems like PATCHs.
  • Signposting people to appropriate services including dental care, advocacy support and complaints pathways.
  • Working with Wirral Community Health Care Trust and Wirral University Teaching Hospital Trust on their Quality Accounts.  A Quality Account is a yearly report that shows how well an NHS service is doing against its annual priorities, what it’s doing to improve care, and what it plans to do better in the future.
  • Working with Primary Care Networks to train staff to become Care Navigator Champions

Making a Difference

Some of the outcomes from our support included:

  • Helping residents to secure appointments, liaising with hospital teams to reduce communication challenges, supporting access to emergency dental treatment, working to resolve concerns about residential care and ensuring families receive appropriate post-hospital support.

BRIDGE (Bringing Information Direction and Guidance to Everyone) Forum: Building Knowledge and Confidence

Our online monthly BRIDGE sessions bring together dozens of attendees and feature speakers from local health, housing, community health and care services. These sessions continue to empower frontline staff by improving knowledge of the non-clinical & clinical services available to them when supporting people. To join our next session, please email [email protected].

What We’re Hearing

Emerging themes include:

  • Continued frustration with digital access to GP services.
  • Concerns about communication delays and a lack of clarity around waiting times.
  • Ongoing issues around support for unpaid carers.

Looking Ahead

We’re continuing to monitor these themes and share insight with system leaders and providers to drive improvement. Thank you to everyone who shared their experiences or support our work. Your story matters. Sharing your experience helps improve services for everyone.