Healthwatch Cumberland Project Reports

This report shares what people across the North East and North Cumbria have told Healthwatch about Modern General Practice Access (MGPA). It brings together early insights gathered through conversations in communities, engagement events, and a survey that remains open. It aims to give a clear picture of what’s working well, where people are struggling, and what could make things easier in the future.

The Cumberland Lived Experience Network organised and hosted 2 workshops, one in Carlisle and one in Whitehaven, with a purpose of finding out the opinions of Cumberland’s d/Deaf community with regards to local health and social care services.

Our Paternal Wellbeing project involved engaging with dads in our area, both listening to their paternal experiences through case studies (telling their story) and from online survey responses. Our aim was to raise awareness of paternal wellbeing struggles and reduce the stigma. We engaged with 345 people through 55 survey responses, 7 case studies and 283 general engagements with dads.

Our Ageing Well project involved travelling across Cumberland and promoting our survey online to gather local people’s opinions on what they would like their care to look like as they age. We carried out 9 focus groups and 3 case studies on top of collecting responses from 607 people with our survey. You can read our report to find out what local people think ‘Ageing Well’ means to them.

Local women told us they wanted our women’s health project to focus on mental health and menopause. We teamed up with a menopause coach to bring tips and advice on how to boost mental health during menopause. We gathered questions about menopause via postcards, and answered these questions through videos posted on our social media and an A-Z of Menopause resource.

An A-Z guide full of wellbeing tips and information to support those experiencing menopause symptoms.

An event held in partnership with Sellafield’s SL A.D.D group to signpost to support available for people with ADHD. The event brought together members of the public and organisations who offer support.

Healthwatch and NHS teams across the North East and North Cumbria teamed up at the end of 2024 to find out people’s opinions on women’s health. In addition to promoting a survey, each local Healthwatch held a focus group with a different demographic of people. Healthwatch Cumberland held a focus group with women with learning disabilities.

The Lived Experience project, in partnership with Cumberland Council, aims to use the voice and experiences of local citizens to help develop and shape local services. We created a networking event, inviting organisations together to explore how lived experience can influence us all when it comes to service improvement.

The primary aim of this project is to raise awareness of addiction and recovery through personal stories, focusing on the person behind the addictive behaviour, with the hope to remove any hint of prejudice and to instead encourage understanding. By sharing these stories and working with the main addiction recovery services in Cumbria, Healthwatch Cumberland aim to improve provision and reduce the barriers people face when accessing support. This can only happen when we have the voice of lived experience at the heart of developing local services.

Between October 2023 and February 2024, we learnt more about local men’s mental health in our Men’s Mental Health project. This included finding out about how local men feel, whether they feel comfortable talking to those around them about their emotions, and if they had accessed any support. We looked at how relationships, exercise and deparavation impact men’s mental health, and discovered some key themes and recommendations.

In 2023, North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) commissioned the Healthwatch Network in the North East and North Cumbria to conduct research into people's views and experiences of NHS dentistry in the region. This report outlines the approach, findings and recommendations of the research.

The engagement for the Healthwatch Cumberland (HWC) ‘Digital Divide’ project ran from 1st August 2023 until 29th September 2023, and in total 57 people shared their experiences and feedback with Healthwatch. The aim of this project was to understand the impact of the recent digital shift as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, on the disabled community. It was highlighted during the Disability Voices project that there are challenges following Covid-19 in relation to the ever-increasing demand on accessibility to online and digital services. Therefore, Healthwatch Cumberland has deeper explored the impact of the recent digital shift as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, on the disabled community. 44 people completed a case study, and HWC facilitated three focus groups to speak to a further 13 participants.

This report is an Easy Read format version of our Disability Voices report.

Between January and March 2023, Healthwatch Cumbria conducted the Disability Voices: Understanding the lives of disabled people in Cumbria project. The project aimed to capture the voices of disabled people across Cumbria in order to understand their experiences of everyday life, the barriers they encounter, their frustrations or worries, and what changes they feel are needed to improve their lives’.