Healthwatch East Sussex Listening Tour

We have been delivering our Listening Tours since 2017, visiting areas across East Sussex to capture people’s views and experiences of health and care.

This year we are refreshing our Listening Tour approach to reach more of the county more regularly. Using the knowledge and experience we have gained through 6 previous tours and other engagement activities. We will now employ our Listening Tour Methods in areas across the county on a rolling basis, visiting multiple areas in a year.

We will continue to use a variety of activity to hear people’s experiences of accessing and using health and care services. Through individual survey, discussion groups, and listening events, we will capture views from a range of communities.

We will be delivering shorter place-based reports, with one annual Listening Tour Summary.

And as always, we will use what we hear to make recommendations to local health and care services, commissioners and decision makers to support positive changes to local services.

2024/2025 Our activity so far:

Wealden District

Between May and August 2024 we kicked off our new approach to the Listening Tour in the Wealden District.

We visited a number of local groups and hosted one listening event. The key findings from this activity include:

• Some people face barriers to accessing primary care, including those with sensory impairments
• Social prescribing could play a key role in helping people find activities of interest to them
• Patient transport and affordable public transport is vital in rural areas
• Carers would like to use their Carers Cards across all sites in NHS Sussex.

Our place-based report from this activity can be found here. 

Lewes and the Havens

Between September to December 2024 we visited Lewes and The Havens.

We have now published our area report from the this work. Our key findings include:

This report outlines the key findings from this activity:

• There are pros and cons of digital access to primary care, including issues of limited capacity, out of hours, and concerns about who is triaging digital enquiries.
• Social prescribing could play a key role in local Integrated Community Teams, and help less confident people access social groups and activities.
• There are limited community and voluntary transport links to the Havens, which can impact on hospital discharge.
• People want to do activities for fun without the purpose of improving health and wellbeing. Lewes Men’s Shed could help provide benches along walking routes.

You can read our full report from our Lewes and the Havens Activity here.

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Phone: 0333 101 4007

Email: enquiries@healthwatcheastsussex.co.uk

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