Kooth Digital Health: The Healthwatch Report
As the largest provider of digital mental health services in the UK, Kooth Digital Health is in a privileged position to be able to see emerging trends in mental health needs from the thousands of service users who logon to their platforms everyday. They share this information with colleagues and partners in the NHS and across the Health and Social Care space, both locally and nationally (all UK nations), through their regular data-rich reporting and publications.
From their work with Healthwatch branches at a local level and from Healthwatch publications they were aware that Healtwatch holds a key role in this picture. Through seeking and hearing patient voices and stories about what it is like to ask for help from health services, Healthwatch was performing vital work to ensure the continuity and amplification of the patient voice. Kooth therefore commenced a project at the end of 2021 to gather some of this information from Healthwatch branches across the country and to piece this together with their learning.
Responses to this Healthwatch mental health survey and the subsequent Healthwatch web event hosted by Kooth in March 2022 revealed that the challenges with access to mental health support are something that local groups and, by proxy, the service users around them are all too aware of.
The report outlines the main concerns of patient representative bodies, the effects of waiting times for support, thresholds to access for certain services, and the uncertainty brought on by the introduction of Integrated Care Systems.
