Healthwatch retention needs to be followed by cultural shift - Nuffield Trust

Responding to the government's announcement that Healthwatch England and local Healthwatch organisations will be retained and strengthened, Nuffield Trust Chief Executive Thea Stein said:

"Abolishing Healthwatch would have thrown away the independence that gave it credibility, without doing anything to address the reasons the NHS often don't listen.

It was the wrong solution to a real problem. Healthwatch has played a valuable role in making it more difficult for the NHS to ignore patients' often frustrating experience of using it.

"This retreat needs to be followed by a cultural shift away from a health service where patients' voices are all too often at the bottom of a long and impossible list.