Community Voices Brunch Event

We heard speeches from our Chief Officer, Lucy Davies, and the Lord Mayor, Safiya Saeed. The Lord Mayor then presented our Community Partners and Healthwatch Heroes with their certificates and awards. We also delivered a community journalism workshop as part of the event. And, in typical Healthwatch Sheffield-fashion we provided a tasty brunch buffet! Read on to hear about the event in more detail…

Community Awards & Speeches

The main focus of our Community Voices event was to celebrate the work of our Healthwatch Heroes and Community Partners. 

Our Healthwatch Heroes awards are for individuals who have gone above and beyond to raise the voices of people in Sheffield and contribute to the improvement of Health and Social Care Services in our city. Those recognised for an award at the event included individual members of the public, service providers, and voluntary sector organisations. Although, we know that there are many more Heroes out there.

Examples of work done by Healthwatch Heroes include: 

• Sharing their experiences of health and social care services with us in a variety of ways such as writing a blog post for our website or talking to our wonderful Information & Advice Officer
• Connecting us with and amplifying the voices of groups they work with - whether that's young people, people with disabilities and/or people belonging to marginalised communities - to ensure their views are represented in conversations about improving health and social care
• Participating in our small grants scheme, SpeakUp, to bring attention to specific issues affecting service users within health and social care

Our Community Partners are voluntary and community sector organisations who have signed up to work collaboratively with Healthwatch Sheffield to strengthen the voice of local people and help improve health and social care. Examples of what our community partners have done alongside us include:

• Joining us for roundtable conversations with MPs, raising important issues on behalf of the people they support so that the voice of local people can impact national conversations about health and social care
• Inviting us to their events so that we can talk to the groups they work with
• Giving us feedback about key issues in health and social care so that we can bring them to the attention of leaders and decision makers in the city

Our Community Partners are listed below:

• Burton Street Foundation                    
• Disability Sheffield and Sheffield Voices
• Saalik Youth Project                            
• Shasbah - Sheffield
• Sheffield Flourish                                
• Terminus Initiative
• Together Women                                
• City of Sanctuary Sheffield
• ISRAAC                                              
• SACMHA
• Sheffield Dementia Action Alliance     
• Sheffield ME and Fibromyalgia Group
• Thalassaemia South Yorkshire           
• Sheffield Mencap

We’d just like to say another massive thank you and congratulations to all our Healthwatch Heroes and Community Partners.

Community Journalism

The second part of our event was a community journalism workshop. Community journalism is where people not trained in writing or journalism report what they’ve seen, experienced, or believe important for other people to know. This workshop was about shining a light on the importance of storytelling in bringing about change and elevating community voices so we asked those attending to have a go at putting what they’d learnt into practice. Working in groups, everyone contributed to creating the front page of a newspaper to highlight issues and good practice in health and social care.

Outro & Thank You

We’d like to finish off by saying a huge thank you to everyone who attended our Community Voices Brunch Event and helped to make it such a brilliant day!

With the news that local Healthwatch and Healthwatch England are closing, it is more important than ever that we work together to make sure the people of Sheffield have access to a local, independent service that listens and speaks up for them. Follow the links below for more information about the decision to abolish Healthwatch.