Speaking up for better care: Annual Report 2025 - 2026
The Annual Report brings together the considerable work that was carried out over the last year and summarises the impact that this has had at a local, regional and national level, including:
- Our volunteers contributed around 250 hours of their valuable time to enable us to speak to 488 patients across 28 Enter & View visits.
- We published 13 reports giving more than 1,770 people a voice in local services
- We Improved A&Es, Inpatient care, GP services, Mental Health Care and ensured that the needs of carers and people with neurological conditions were understood and addressed
- Our work on general practice influenced The Leng Review which has changed the way that Physician Associates work
- People viewed our communications over 180,000 times and engaged with them over 70,000 times.
In our last Annual Report, we celebrated the stability of securing long term funding. Within days of publishing our report, the then Secretary of State announced his plans to abolish Healthwatch and merge the role into Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and Local Authorities.
This left us managing considerable uncertainty over the past year. It is uncertainty that we have faced with renewed focus and renewed commitment to delivering for our community in the time that we have left. The report describes how we managed that uncertainty as well as showing the impact of our redoubled efforts.
Delivering the Healthwatch Richmond role has been valuable and rewarding work enabled by our statutory basis, by the powers and independence that it affords us and by the commitment and time that our community has given us in sharing their views and experiences and in volunteering to support our work.
Whilst we have reservations over the loss of independence, statutory powers and of the valuable signposting role that will result from this transfer, we will work to ensure that both our role, and our commitment to delivering it transfer. We aim to leave a lasting legacy of services that are better and fairer than they would have been had we not existed and of a system that continues to value patient voice after our role transfers to the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and South West London ICB.
