Extraordinary General Meeting
Wednesday 11 June 10.30am-12.30pm
Room 1, Education Centre, Mile End Hospital
Chair: David Burbidge
AgendaSpecial amendments to Articles of Association
Resolution to be voted on by the members of Healthwatch Tower Hamlets.
It is resolved to modify the Clause 4 (OBJECTS), by deleting sub -clauses (2) to (4) .It should thus read:-
The charity’s objects (‘Objects’) are the advancement of health and the relief of those in need by reason of youth, age, ill-health, disability or financial hardship within the geographical boundaries of Tower Hamlets by:
(a) Providing information and advice to the general public about local health and social care service;
(b) Making the views and experience of members of general public known to health and social care providers;
(c) Enabling local people to have a voice in the development, delivery and equality of access to local health and care services and facilities and;
(d) Providing training and the development of skills for volunteers and the wider community in understanding, reviewing, scrutinisingand monitoring local health and care services.
2. It is also resolved that sub-clause(4) of clause 4 (OBJECTS) is moved to Clause 5 (POWERS) as an additionalsub- clause.
Healthwatch Tower Hamlets Board Meeting
Wednesday 11 June 10.30am-12.30pm
Room 1, Education Centre, Mile End Hospital
Agenda / Time / Lead1 / Welcome, introductions and apologies / 10:30-10:35 / Chair David Burbidge
Business Items
2 / Minutes of the meeting of meeting 9thApril 2014 / 10:35-10:45 / All
4 / Outcome and Impact 2014-15 (Draft attached) / 10:45-11:00 / Di and Daniel
5 / Portacabin at Royal London Hospital / 11:00-11:15 / David and Di
6 / Annual Report (outline draft to be sent early next week) / 11:15-11.30 / Dianne
7 / Community Health Event 14 August
- Voluntary & Community Sector project update
- Setting priorities for 2014/15
8 / Confirm reps for Health Scrutiny Panel / 11:45-11:50 / All
9 / Agree Terms of Reference for the Review and Monitoring Committee / 11:50-12:00 / All
Updates and information
10 /
- Online engagement – website, content management system and intelligence dashboard
- Communications and Engagement Officer
- TUPE
- Bank account
- Dates for sub group committees (attached)
Shamsur
Di
Di
11 / AOB / 12:20-12:30 / All
Date of next meeting: Thursday 21th August 2014, 10.00am-12.00pm
Healthwatch Tower Hamlets Board Meeting
Wednesday 11 June 10.30-12.30
Room 1, Education Centre, Mile End Hospital
Attendees
Board Members
David Burbidge (Co-Chair) / Myra GarrettBill Colverson / Enayet Sarwar
Emma Cassells / Sharmin Shajahan
Staff
Dianne Barham / Shamsur ChoudhuryApologies
Amjad Rahi (Co-chair) / Jobeda AliChair: David Burbidge
Extraordinary General Meeting
Agreed: Board members agreed to the Special Amendments to the Article of Association
- Welcome and Introductions
Dianne will make a list of issues to send people, such as the waiting time for oral surgery, the person who had to call an ambulance from her hospital bed, the person who died due to the transport service, a person who committed suicide because of mental health issues.
Action: If anybody else has anymore issues from this month let Diane know.
Myra provided feedback from the Save Our Surgeries demonstration. It was a successful march; over a thousand people attended the demonstration and visited 14 surgeries on the way to Kingsley Hall. A donation of £450 was raised.
On the 5th of July 2014 (the Birthday of the NHS) there will be more activities, perhaps an open top bus driving around Newham, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. In terms of trying to get NHS England to change their minds seems bleak. They are saying they can’t change it, the message was that we have to amend the health and social care bills because within that it says the secretary of state is no longer responsible for health and there is no parliamentary oversight. The crucial issue is to change the legislation.
David stated that Unite and Unison are funding this, from the HWTH point of view we may be able to ask whoever commissions this which services will be affected and by how much money. HWTH can gather the facts and present them as they are but cannot get politically involved.
Business Items
- Minutes of April meeting
Dianne said they are interviewing three providersfor the Online Engagement Website onFriday 13th of June 2014.The meeting will be with Dianne, Shamsur, Bill Colverson, and Bill from the CCG.
Myra was at the Mental Health Workshop with Us Creates and Open Objects. The council just decided that they will give the contract to the Idea Store and suddenly they bought in all these consultants like Us Creates and Open Objects and are spending masses of money and there were only three service users at this meeting. Myra stated that she was not very happy with that meeting. Myra is very worried about the fact that this is entirely an online provision and many people don’t use online services.
Shamsur spoke about the report from the Review and Monitoring Committee, he said 15 to 20 Enter and View visits per year is realistic because some services do not get back on time and have to be chased up frequently, the visits then get pushed back to the next month.
Action: Send the terms of reference back to the review committee and ask them to review and come back to us.
Dianne said regarding Number five on the Review & Monitoring Committee, where possible, if we do a visit that was not planned maybe we can call it Visits Program Outline because it’s not going to tell you every place that will be visited, it will give higher level outline of the places we will visit.
The Enter & View trainingwill take place on Monday 16th June 2014and Shamsur informed the group that two members will be co-opted who have been regularly attending Enter & View visits (these two members have been emailed and Shamsur is awaiting a response). Also when new members are recruited they should be encouraged to take part in Enter & View visits.
Dianne emailed Lesley Pavitt, who said she would be interested in joining HWTH. The group were also informed that Mike Earlston is interested in joining HWTH.Mikaeel from Look Ahead is coming to the Enter & View training on Monday. We also asked Real if they would be interested in becoming Board members too. We wrote back to the Health & Well-Being Steering Group Forum; Dianne needs the Health & Well-Being Forum to say that they are the reps; otherwise we will still be stuck in the position where we are not engaged.
It was suggested that we have all the Review and Monitoring Committee meetings will meet a month before the Board meeting so they can feed into the Board meeting.
Agreed: Everyone was happy with the Committee Meeting dates
- Outcome and Impact 2014-15
Daniel and Dianne discussed at the last Advisory Group about this and came up with key priorities. One of which was around community health services because the contract is being re-commissioned and it might give us a chance to influence things. And might want to look at specific areas of community health services and if we follow the outline we can find out what the outcome is to be, what actions we will undertake and what we want the impact to be. It will give us much more focus on what we are doing under our priorities.
David informed that there are 450 places in North East London for Health Visitors which means next year there will be 50 more Health Visitors. They are being transferred to the management of Public Health. The training is coming from LETB (the Educational Training Board), when they come out the extra money is being given by the government to pay for them. It’s part of the Prime Ministers commitment. Barts are not really paying for it.
Agreed: The Board agreed that it will be interesting to get more information on this and Dianne will try and get Shamyl to come to the Advisory group and provide more information on this.
Two main areas came out of the Advisory Group meeting yesterday.
- About the community health services re-commissioning, there are some clear things we can do there.
- We feel that we have a gap in engaging with faith communities, and an idea of developing a project to link in better with faith networks.The idea is get faith groups to engage in what’s happening in the community, and promote Healthwatch and public health and engage them in their health. Churches and faith groups tend to be the first ones know when there is a crisis (food banks, homeless shelters).
Also the impact of the care reps: Everyone will be re-assessed under the new care act, there will be less money and people with less moderate needs will be cut.
We need to get users perspectives on that, whether they come out of the Patient Leader’s project or whether there’s something we can do with a group of voluntary sector partners. We also spoke about getting someone from the carers centre into the Advisory Group
Sharminlaunched a service user’s forum in March for epilepsy patients. At the same time they are running a self management program which are piloting in TH and Hackney, the same issues are coming out every week about who is going to take responsibility of assessing them, no one’s taking any responsibility. We can only sign post to a certain extent, but they need more advocacy and advice rather than just information. We need every third Monday at Toynbee Hall (times and dates on flyers). We have had service user’s feedback through that as well.
Action: Dianne will make sure that the Communications Campaign knows about Sharmin’s group
Board members were not happy with the information Voice Abilityare providing. They send reports through each month but do not tell the specifics and do not send more information when requested. They deal with an about 10 people in Tower Hamlets a month.
- David thinks we should voice our doubts about being re-contracted to Voice Ability.
- Dianne suggested we could lobby to the local authority to give us the contract.
- Porter Cabin at Royal London Hospital
Royal London Hospital has agreed to give us a piece of land and Skanska has agreed to give us two porter cabins. We could use the cabins for a charity shop and signposting information office above. We want to make clear to the board members that if we do the charity shop any income from that will be used to go back into the community, we were thinking of calling it ‘Watching your Health’. It will be very much about supporting grass root communities and small projects to tackle local health issues, support small projects that make big difference. Some of the money would have to go into signposting. There will be costs of the set up, and technical issues such as gas and electric. The charity shop will be managed and run by volunteers who will also be trained in providing information and signposting. Healthwatch offices in Mile End will stay where it is. The charity shop will be almost independent but will be running alongside Healthwatch.
Dianne is worried that if we start generating a good income the council might decide that they don’t have to give us grant money. Dianne said we need a one of grant to get us through the first six months until we start generating income and if we don’t generate any income we can use the space for something else.
David estimated charity shops make a hundred to two hundred thousand a year e.g. Spitalfields trust in Bethnal Green Road is turning out about two hundred and fifty thousand pounds a year, llamas pyjamas turning out about a hundred and seventy five thousand a year and all of the money goes into managing the shop and fundraising.We will need a volunteer manager and about 19 to 20 volunteers.
Because we can only get temporary planning permission on porter cabins, we will be at the site for 2-3 years, and when the new Town Hall is completed, we can request to be incorporated asa ‘Community Information Centre’ into the building. There will be thousands of people going inside the hospital, and we can put up a big campaign saying ‘Join Healthwatch’. We can provide a free phone service to other Healthwatche’s; this will be a massive boost to our membership.
Emma suggested we should have pop up shop and can rent out the space when we are not using it.
It was suggested that we can have health checks at the porter cabins and Shamyl is interested in using it as a public health information session when the charity shop is not in use. And we will need to have a member of staff managing the shop and the volunteers.
Myra was worried that it is a lot of work to run a charity shop and a lot for a volunteer to manage. Mayra also pointed out that we are not able to manage ourselves very well at the moment; even the proposal that doing a pilot for six months is a huge undertaking. She also stated that people donate rubbish.
David stated that we will have to control the rubbish andthe security aspect. He is talking to the facilities director at the moment and all these issues can be ironed out, for example keys can be left and collected from the security office. There will be no problems with rubbish being left on the doorway because the security guards will drop them inside and things like that.
Sharmin was also worried about managing the shop because we need to continuously review it every six months.Sharmin pointed out that we need a dedicated staff to manage the volunteers because we spend so much time, money and energy on the volunteers and then after two three months they leave. It is time consuming.
Emma pointed out we don’t have a core set of volunteers who we can just promote into the shop.
Shamsur saidmaybe we could have a paid staff to support the volunteers and eventually the volunteers can become paid staff.
David stated we will need a casual worker to work out the volunteer rota, the practicalities, gift aid schemes will need to be administered etc.
- Annual Report (outline draft to be sent early next week)
Diane said she will circulate the annual report by the end of next week. The draft is about trying to make sure the annual report fits in with what HW England want, following a structure. It is also about showing how we came up with our priorities, how we are working with our networks, what recommendations we made, and a summary of the Enter View programs. The report is supposed to tell a narrative and show an impact.
Action: It has to be put in by the 30th of June, so any input to Dianne needs to be given to her fairly quickly. We have to put our accounts in their too.
- Community Health Event 14 August
Voluntary & Community Sector Project Update
Shamsur informed the board that Healthwatch TH have organised a Community Health Event in the BradyCentre from 10:30 – 3:30. On the day they will be showcasing all the projects they have been doing e.g. Barts Voices, Patient Leaders, Housebound Project, the Homeless Project, the Young Peoples Panel. Hopefully they will get commissioners on the panel. Prior to the event the responses of the projects will be analysed, looking at key questions that are coming out of them. People could come along and get feedback on the projects, and showcase to the community about what HWTH do as an organisation.
Dianne added that this year they want look at what is likely to be the big commissioning priorities and then set out more specific priorities such as foot health around community health, Barts and outpatients, issues of engaging with the faith community or tackling social isolation. People can then choose which issue specific priorities they want to give feedback on.
Action: Circulate the list of all the different projects.
Myra was concerned about HWTH competing with the voluntary sector for funding of projects. She pointed out that there’s some wounded feelings about HW getting money for projects that should go to the voluntary sector that are already established. She said HW should have a principle of not competing with the voluntary sector and wherever possible to be working in partnership with them.
Myra also thinks HW has to be very careful, it’s a very sensitive area, everything is going to be up for tendering soon and lots of organisations will lose it completely. We have to be very careful about not further undermining the way small projects feel about what’s happening.
Dianne argued that if the projects are about gathering patient experience, patient feedback and engagement then Healthwatch and within the HWTH field of expertise then HWTH should compete for the grant. It is also in the contract that HWTH should generate income; HWTH is also a voluntary sector.