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This report details the responses we received from hospitals following our ‘Waiting for hospital care’ report.

In Surrey around 100,000 people are currently waiting for hospital treatment and this figure is not expected to start falling until 2024. Along with neighbouring local Healthwatch, we developed a questionnaire to hear the experiences of those who are waiting for hospital care.

This report details our key findings and provides insight that will enable services to support those waiting and minimise the harm of long waits.

The second report provides details of the 4 responses we received from the 4 main hospitals in Surrey Heartlands. This report will also be shared, including to the Healthwatch England library and with Surrey Heartlands Joint Intelligence Group (JIG).

One of the statutory duties of Healthwatch is to obtain the views of local people regarding their needs for, and experiences of, local care services and importantly to make these views known.

This briefing summarises key themes we’ve heard throughout January 2022.

This project was undertaken to investigate the experience of Discharge to Assess from the perspective of Carers of those admitted to hospital. Our aim is that this insight will guide development and implementation of the D2A programme to maximise safe, successful hospital discharges. This was a joint project between Action for Carers and Healthwatch Surrey.

All local acute trusts and Surrey County Council have provided full written responses to our recommendations from our report Carers’ Experiences of Hospital Discharge.

During the pandemic, hospital appointments were inevitably delayed. On the whole Surrey residents were very stoic about this, understanding that the NHS was under unprecedented pressure and accepted service cancellations; indeed, some people chose to cancel appointments themselves.

However, as time went on and lockdown eased last summer some people started to feel frustration and questioned when they would get seen. They had been told their treatment was delayed or cancelled but had not been given any information about what would happen next.

Would their treatment be rescheduled? What would happen next?

This report summarises the responses from the hospitals to our recommendations based on NHS guidelines.