Our involvement of people priority
Ultimately, more effective services, and those which work better for the people who use them.
To achieve this, we believe that:
- High-quality service user feedback should be a required and welcomed element in all service decision making – people know where to take feedback to make it effective, there is proof user feedback improves services and feedback is everyone’s business and welcomed.
- All service user groups should be ‘heard’ in ways that work for them – people are listened to equally and processes enable them to feedback without fear of repercussions.
Recent work under this priority
Our recent work under this priority has included:
- Our Hospital Feedback Project began in 2023 when we visited hospitals and across Surrey and gathered experiences about peoples’ knowledge and understanding of feedback mechanisms and barriers to giving feedback. We revisited the project a year after it completed and held each Trust to account; asking them to update on the actions they’d committed to in the short term and reviewing the long-term changes that were planned. In March 2025, we were shortlisted for a Healthwatch Impact award for this work.
- We undertook interviews and a survey to find out neurodivergent people’s experiences of outpatients in Surrey Hospitals. We have presented the findings at hospital patient experience meetings and there has been interest across our hospitals and health and social care system. From this we also developed a video highlighting the need for the Accessible Information Standard to be adhered to.
- We are now compiling responses to our project looking at whether community healthcare services are accessible/available to people who are homebased (medically classified as being housebound).
Reports and bulletins relating to this priority can be found under the Involvement of people category of our reports section on our website.