Healthwatch Norfolk has a legal power to visit health and social care services to try to understand patients’ and service users’ experience of them. This power to Enter and View services offers a way for Healthwatch to do the work it was set up for, and lets it find out what is working well with services, and where they could be improved.
Although Enter and View sometimes gets referred to as an ‘inspection’, it should not be described as such, since we are mainly focused on service users’ experiences.
We use what people tell us and what we know about local services to decide which services to visit.
Our first Enter and View project since lockdown ended will be called My Views Matter and you can read more about it here.
During the visit our authorised representatives* observe the nature and quality of the services and aim to collect views directly from service users, their family, and carers. These findings help us monitor and challenge health and social care services. Following the visits, we can make recommendations to the people who run services so they can make improvements.
*’Authorised representatives’ are Healthwatch Norfolk staff, volunteers or experts by experience who are trained in Enter and View Visits.
We can do either an announced visit – where the provider knows we are coming – or an unannounced visit.
Most of our enter and view visits are announced. But we are authorised to do unannounced visits if we think this is the best way to get the evidence we need.
During the visit, Healthwatch should focus on:
- Seeing how people experience the service through watching and listening
- Speaking to people using the service, their carers, and relatives, to find out more about their experiences and views
- Observing the nature and quality of services
- Reporting their findings to the people who provide the services, regulate them, pay for them, monitor their quality, Healthwatch England, and any other relevant partners based on what was found during the visit
Our volunteers and experts by experience who are trained to make the visits are:
- Helen Jackson, Penny Sutton, Brigit Chisholm, Kay Durrant, Lauren Chapman, Sarah Harrison, Carol Edwards and Tony Edwards.
Staff who are trained to make ‘enter and view’ visits (pictured above) are:
- Judith Bell, Dan Norgrove, John Spall, Fiona Tyas, Sophie Slater, Angela George, Caroline Williams, Jessica Hickin and Rachael Green.
After the visit
After our visit we will write and publish a report. We will share this with the people who make decisions about the service we have visited.
And work with service providers to help them make positive changes based on our recommendations.
We normally publish our report about eight weeks after a visit.
Healthwatch statutory functions
- The legislative framework for Healthwatch is split between what Healthwatch must do (duties) and what they may do (powers). Healthwatch have a power under the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 20071 and Part 4 of the Local Authorities Regulations 20132 to carry out Enter and View visits.
- Healthwatch should consider how Enter and View activity links to the statutory functions in section 221 of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2003 . The purpose of an Enter and View visit is to collect evidence of what works well and what could be improved to make people’s experiences better. Healthwatch can use this evidence to make recommendations and inform changes both for individual services as well as system wide.
