News and reports

The number of people being cared for in their own homes is increasing but what should you expect from home care services?

This report into the term ambulatory care finds out if the public understand the term, how we could better describe it, the pros and cons to the idea including whether people actually supported the idea of a home / virtual ward.

We worked with Healthwatch Wigan and Leigh to promote an online survey to gather expert by experiences, views and comments regarding Bolton council's proposed changes to its wheelchair eligibility criteria.

A year ago the Accessible Information Standard came into force. It requires any organisation providing NHS or social care to communicate in a way that everybody can understand. Here's a reminder of what you should expect.

In this report we highlight our findings regarding what people understand the health and care concerns are faced by those in work. For the purposes of this study we focused on workers at a single, large office site in Bolton.

Read our report from our visit to Lever Edge. We spoke to staff and residents as well as observing practices throughout the day. Our report contains full details of all our findings together with the recommendations we put forward.

Read our report to discover our full findings during our visit to Sunnyside. We spoke to staff and residents as well as observing practices during the time we were there. Our report also includes the recommendations we put forward following our visit

We visited a prostate cancer support group to speak to attendees about prostate specific services but also health care in its wider spectrum. This reports highlights the responses and views we received.

We organised a forum to further explore people’s views on health related peer to peer support type activity. A number of organisations and groups who use this model were invited, along with the general public, to share their views and experiences.

This project aimed to help inform how the primary care workforce chould be structured and the future use of technologies to help support communication. We asked people for thier views on their preferred methods of communication and why.

The Bolton GP Federation asked Healthwatch to develop and deliver a small piece of public engagement to gather patient’s views and ideas about what aspects of such a service would improve their experience of accessing health and well-being services.

Changes were made to eligibility criteria for podiatry services in Bolton. Following thise a number of comments were made to us. This report presents these views to illustrate how service changes can affect patients.