Cornish Communities in Focus: Evolving Voices in Mental Health

I really liked Healthwatch Cornwall’s approach to looking at mental heath services in their area. I spoke to Jenny Wheeldon, Research Manager to find out more.

What led you to decide to do this piece of work?

We choose our reports at the beginning of our contractual year (usually April) so mental health as a topic would have been chosen in April 2024. We are led by the feedback we receive from the Cornish community, and from our Have Your Say function it was clear that access to mental health services in the county was an important topic that we needed to cover.

How long would you say it took in total to pull together all the information, insights and finalise the report?

To meet our contractual obligations, we had a tight turnaround for our mental health research project and it was very much a team effort between myself, our CEO, our Data Officer and our Communications Coordinator. Once the data collection period was completed, we had a 6-week window to analyse the data, consult with stakeholders, write up the findings and finalise the report for publication.

You make good use of infographics, who creates them?

I create them myself, mostly using the SmartArt function on Microsoft Office. I would recommend using it to others as it’s very easy to use and can be adapted easily to fit the Healthwatch branding.

Your recommendations are a good mix of wide themes but specific actions. What has been your experience of getting responses to your recommendations in the past, and how did this inform your approach to developing the recommendations in this report?

We consulted with contacts from the VCSE which really helped shape our last recommendations of the report – we were keen to ensure a fair representation and not frame reliance on the voluntary sector as part of the problem. We are hopeful that decision-makers will incorporate our recommendations into their strategies moving forward – this was the case for our Dentistry Report published last year, with our recommendations being directly cited and responded to in the local ICB’s Primary Care Strategy.

How do you plan to follow up on the recommendations?

We are in close contact with the local ICB and representatives in the VCSE and can follow up with them. We will monitor how our recommendations are reflected in local strategies, service developments and funding decisions. We will also track our Have Your Say data over the next year and examine how mental health service experiences may be evolving from a public perspective.

I usually advise LHW to keep projects as focussed as possible, but you have struck a nice balance between it being across all of Cornwall but being able to have some specific actions. Was there any learning from this approach?

We packed a lot into our mental health report and we’re now keen for our future reports to drill down into more specific areas moving forward – strategically, we feel this is the best way we can make maximum impact. For example, our next research topic will be GP Access. Rather than simply stating what we already know – that access is a national issue – we’ll be focusing on a more specific area/sub-theme that will be most relevant to Cornwall, informed by our Have Your Say data.

I’m proud of our mental health recommendations but moving forward I’d really like to frame our recommendations into three key stakeholder groups: the public, service-provider and decision-maker recommendations. We think this will improve readability and make it easier for our different audiences to find what’s relevant to them more easily.