Healthwatch Milton Keynes is the local consumer champion for the provision of high quality and effective health, wellbeing and social care services for all, across Milton Keynes. Our mission is to be an independent organisation, providing an effective local voice for people in Milton Keynes, influencing and shaping health and social care services to meet their needs.
Healthwatch Milton Keynes has been empowering the people of Milton Keynes to have a say in how health and social care services are planned and delivered for six years. We have a statutory role, legislated in the Health and Social Care Act 2012, to provide an independent voice on people’s experiences of health and care.
An emphasis on joint commissioning, integrated working, budgetary pressures and an increasing demand on services has transformed the health and social care landscape around us. Healthwatch Milton Keynes works to influence local health and social care planning and provision, based on the experiences and needs of the public and those who use, and care for those who use services.
Healthwatch Milton Keynes must carry out particular activities in line with the legislative requirements of local Healthwatch as set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Our activities include:
1) Promoting and supporting the involvement of local people in the commissioning, the provision and scrutiny of local care services.
2) Enabling local people to monitor the standard of provision of local care services and whether and how local care services could and ought to be improved;
3) Obtaining the views of local people regarding their needs for, and experiences of, local care services and importantly to make these views known.
4) Making reports and recommendations about how local care services could or ought to be improved. These should be directed to commissioners and providers of care services, and people responsible for managing or scrutinising local care services and shared with Healthwatch England.
5) Providing advice and information about access to local care services so choices can be made about local care services.
6) Formulating views on the standard of provision and whether and how the local care services could and ought to be improved; and sharing these views with Healthwatch England.
7) Making recommendations to Healthwatch England to advise the Care Quality Commission to conduct special reviews or investigations (or, where the circumstances justify doing so, making such recommendations direct to the CQC); and to make recommendations to Healthwatch England to publish reports about particular issues.
8) Providing Healthwatch England with the intelligence and insight it needs to enable it to perform effectively.
