Annual Public Meeting 2022

We kicked the morning off with a marketplace of stalls for networking, where we had invited many fantastic organisations within health and social care, to spread awareness about their work and the long-term conditions that they work with.

Stalls included: dDeaflinks, Revival, Approach Staffordshire, Crossroads Care, Pink Sisters and Misters, Staffordshire Diabetes Prevention Programme, Lung Health Checks, Bowel Cancer Screening Facilities, and our local Health Protection Team with Cervical Screening.
We wish to say a big thank you to all for supporting our event.

Once everyone had arrived and had an opportunity to mingle, CEO Simon Fogell along with Lloyd Cooke, Chair of the Healthwatch Advisory Board presented last year’s annual report. You can read more about it by clicking here.

Volunteer’s Ruby, Kevin and Carol shared their experiences of volunteering with Healthwatch and why volunteering is important to them. If you wish to learn more about volunteering check out our volunteering page or contact us.

At the end of the event, we were joined by Integrated Care Board (ICB) speakers, Steve Grange and Dr Rachel Gallyot. Together they covered the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Integrated Care System’s (ICS) aims to support local people with frailty and long-term conditions, how they plan to achieve it and their anticipated outcomes. We learnt about the importance of working together with our National Health Service by spreading awareness or using self-management as a preventative measure, which can help to reduce risks and the severity of some health conditions.

“It was good to see different organisations coming together to promote how they can offer advice and support to people living with long term conditions. It was inspiring to listen to Ruby, Carol and Kevin on what volunteering for Healthwatch means to them. Steve and Rachel gave a very interesting and informative overview of the range and number of people living with long term conditions and thanked Healthwatch for our contributions and fair challenge that we present over a range of meetings in sharing what people tell us and about involving people in future system design. We will certainly be taking Steve up on his offer to follow up with another meeting to look more at the plans the ICS has for long term care in Stoke-on-Trent. A personal thank you to everyone who made the day possible and attended, plus our guest speakers Steve and Rachel!”

- Simon Fogell, Chief Executive of Healthwatch Stoke-on-Trent