6: Finding the voice of the people in the pandemic
An ethnographic account of the work of local Healthwatch in the first weeks of England’s COVID-19 crisis
On 23 March 2020, the UK government issued a broad range of advice and regulations intended to curb the spread of COVID-19 and prevent the National Health Service (NHS) from being overwhelmed by people needing care. At that time, our research team was in the midst of a 30-month study aimed at exploring the work of Healthwatch, England’s statutory organisation with responsibility for championing the views of citizens in the commissioning and provision of health and social care services in each of the country’s 152 local authorities (see Box 6.1).
The core of our study was a year-long ethnography (started in August 2019) of five Healthwatch groups, focusing on their daily activities and relationships with key stakeholders locally. Alongside our work in the five study sites, our study relied on a panel of 15 Healthwatch representatives, both staff and volunteers, to increase the breadth and generalisability of our ethnographic findings.
After the pandemic hit, we moved our research online. We kept in regular contact with Healthwatch staff, board members, volunteers, and local stakeholders, and observed them in the virtual meetings they attended. We also carried out one-to-one virtual interviews with 13 of our panel members and held a virtual meeting attended by 14 of them to discuss how their organisations were adjusting their work during the pandemic. Here we draw on data collected in the first six weeks of the national lockdown to describe how the COVID-19 crisis impacted the work of local Healthwatch.
For Healthwatch organisations in England, the new ‘stay-at-home’ regulations had immediate effects.
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