Sharing your feedback about health & social care services - October 2026

Patient and public feedback

The government’s plans to abolish Healthwatch, announced in July 2025, did not involve consulting the wider public. 

As a result, four Healthwatch teams (Healthwatch Brighton and Hove, Healthwatch East Sussex, Healthwatch Surrey and Healthwatch West Sussex) ran a short survey to enable local people to have their say about how they would like to share experiences and insights about health and care services.

536 people responded and overwhelmingly supported retaining an independent mechanism for gathering people's feedback:  

• A total of 94% considered that an independent organisation which collected feedback was either important or extremely important. 
• 70% said they would prefer to share their feedback and insights about health and social care with an independent organisation rather than directly with service providers.

“I value Healthwatch as a person with long-term condition; I am not comfortable raising complaints direct with NHS as it affected the way I was treated since and not in a good way.”

The strongest concerns about giving feedback directly to service providers were that:

• they would not hear how their feedback would be used (55%)
• it might affect their future care (50%)
• it would take too long to receive a response (50%)
• it could not be provided anonymously (44%). 

Further analysis of 955 comments reinforced these findings.

“Knowing it is anonymised and that my care is not adversely affected.”

The analysis shows that the removal of an independent feedback organisation (including a free helpline) may be particularly detrimental to those facing health inequalities, especially people with disabilities and long-term conditions and carers.

“…having one place that covers all health and care services would be helpful so that it's clear and easy to navigate and you don't have to talk to multiple people about different parts of feedback.”