The "watchdog" organisation Healthwatch Enfield has issued its Annual Report for 2015/16.
Healthwatch defines its role as follows:
Healthwatch Enfield is the independent consumer champion for health and social care in the borough.
We’re here to amplify the voices of local people and to help them find the health and social care services that they need.
Everything we say and do is informed by our connections to local people. Our sole focus is on understanding the needs, positive experiences and concerns of people of all ages and all backgrounds who use local services or who have loved ones who do.
We use this information to help these people’s voices to be heard. We also work to encourage those who plan and deliver services locally to engage better with local people, and to put their experiences at the heart of service delivery.
The annual report lists various ways in which it has fulfilled these functions over the year. These include encouraging GP surgeries to improve their administrative methods and looking into problems affecting specific groups of patients.
All very commendable, but surely these issues pale into insignificance compared with problems such as the shortage of GPs, chronic underfunding of Enfield CCG and, of course, the near collapse of the accident and emergency department at the borough's most important hospital? Should a "consumer champion" not be trying to ensure adequate levels of primary healthcare and hospital capacity?
There is absolutely no mention of these vitally important issues in the report. Healthwatch can't have been unaware of them, they're not problems that have cropped up overnight. One can only assume that the Departmente of Health does not permit them to bring up these most important subjects. So a watchdog that Enfield Council is required to fund to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds a year is muzzled and not even allowed to bark, let alone bite.
