Healthwatch Enfield is part of the independent national Healthwatch England network.
We have the power to ‘enter’ and ‘view’ any care or nursing home or any other publicly funded health or care service. This means that, by law, we are allowed go into these settings and see what is happening.
We regularly carry out Enter and View assessments at:
- care and nursing homes
- hospitals
- primary care services
- adult residential units
- day centres
In care and nursing homes, we speak to the people who live there, their relatives, friends and the staff. We try to find out how they feel about living or working there and the care they receive.
When we talk to people, we write down what they tell us and put it in to a report. We do not use people’s names or any personal information, so individuals cannot be identified.
What happens to the reports?
We send the provider (the people who run the home/care setting) a draft copy of the report for their comment and how they plan to act on our recommendations. We then publish our Enter and View reports publicly and we also send them to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), Healthwatch England, the Local Authority and the Enfield Directorate of North Central London Clinical Commissioning Groups.
If there are concerns raised in one of our reports this could trigger a visit from the CQC.
The people who run the service must respond to our reports by law. They must tell us what action they intend to take to make things better or, if no action can be taken, they must explain why not.
Last year we published six Enter and View reports and made 42 recommendations for improvement. 39 of these (93%) have been implemented or accepted to be implemented in the near future.
How we work with providers
Even though we have statutory powers to ‘enter and view’ a service, we find that we rarely need to use them. This is because leaders at most care and nursing homes want to work with us so they get help to improve the service they deliver.
Our independent research is used to support the management to make things better for residents and often their staff. We make a point of highlighting and sharing the good practices that we observe and we make realistic recommendations to help make improvements where necessary.