Enter and view reports

Since June 2014, Healthwatch Kirklees has been doing Enter and View visits to local health and social care providers.

You can find details of our visits to date listed at the bottom of this page.

What is an Enter and View visit? 

It’s a visit to a publicly funded health or social care service led by Authorised Representatives from Healthwatch Kirklees. We go in to day services, care homes, hospital wards, GP surgeries, etc… and we speak to the people using those services to find out what they think. We can do this at agreed times or do unannounced spot checks. It’s not an inspection of the service, but we use the visit to make sure that people are able to get the support they need from that service and to learn more about the service. We then report back to providers and commissioners of service and, where appropriate, to the regulators.

In order to do these visits, we need a team of trained, volunteer Authorised Representatives. We have just recruited 10 volunteers to this team and we are establishing our plan for visits over the next few months.

But what does it mean to be an Authorised Representative?

Authorised Representatives are trained volunteers who assist in every stage of the visit – they help to arrange it, to complete it, and to report back the findings. There is guidance and support to do this provided by our Volunteer Coordinator, Katherine Sharp.

When you are asked to be an Authorised Representative for a visit, planning, preparing, completing and reporting back on that visit can be quite time consuming, but you can be involved in as many or as few visits as you would like to be across the year.

If you are interested in doing this role, just get in touch with Katherine to express an interest. Check out our volunteering page for more information.

In addition to doing Enter and View visits, we’re regularly invited to accompany North Kirklees Clinical Commissioning Group on their Patient Safety Walkabouts at different health care settings. We welcome this opportunity to speak to patients, visitors and staff with the commissioner.

We are clear that any Enter & View work that we do needs to add value to the visits completed in Kirklees by partners at the Care Quality Commission, Clinical Commissioning Group, Kirklees Council and Monitor.