Enter & View

Enter and View visits can happen if people tell us there is a problem with a service, equally, they can occur when services have a good reputation. We may even carry out an ‘Enter & View’ just to get to know a service better, this is called a ‘Familiarisation’ visit.

Healthwatch has the legal power to visit health and social care services to see what is working well and identify areas for improvement. The evidence collected is used to make people's experiences better.

To help improve people's experiences we make recommendations and inform changes, both for individual services and system. 'Enter & View' also provides a way to involve people whose experiences might otherwise not be heard.

The legislation allows 'Enter & View' to take place on premises where health and social care is publicly funded such as:

Health Care

  • Hospitals
  • GP's
  • Dentists
  • Pharmacies

Social Care

  • Care Homes
  • Domiciliary Care
  • Personal Assistants
  • Social Workers

Our representatives carry out these visits to health and social care settings to find out how they are being run and make recommendations where there are areas for improvement from a patient perspective.

Enter and View visits can happen if people tell us there is a problem with a service, equally, they can occur when services have a good reputation. We may even carry out an 'Enter & View' just to get to know a service better, this is called a 'Familiarisation' visit.

After an 'Enter & View' visit, we create a report. Any recommendations made are clear, proportionate, offer achievable service improvements and reflect the views of the people met during the visit.

Providers get an opportunity to respond to our report and reports are shared with the following people:

  • Providers
  • Quality Assurers
  • Regulators
  • The Public
  • Local Authority
  • Healthwatch England
  • NHS Commissioners
  • Other Key Partners

Enter & View Reports

We regularly publish our most recent Enter & View reports on the reports section of our website. Click below to find out more.

Read our reports