A Christmas message

We are enormously grateful to all those of you who have continued to support our work over the last year, be it by sharing your experiences of care, giving up your time as a volunteer or acting on people’s feedback. You’ve helped us be a champion for local people.

Sadly, health and social care services across the country remain under enormous pressure, with growing waiting lists for hospital and community care treatments. Coupled with the rising cost of living, we know that many people are facing a very difficult winter (read more in our cost of living report as well as the support and financial help that is available).

Our thanks and hearts go out to the people working in hospitals, care homes, GP practices, dentists and the many other vital services. All are working so very hard to keep us safe and well. 

We have worked with both Integrated Care Systems (ICS) who cover North Yorkshire (Humber and North Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership and West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership, who cover Craven). This way of working has given us a unique chance to feed people’s views into the planning and running of services – especially the voices of those who are not being heard now.

We have also worked with charities, voluntary organisations, community enterprises, all seven district and borough councils (which will become a single new council for everyone in North Yorkshire from April 2023), and North Yorkshire County Council. We have shared health advice campaigns as well as signposted people to services on offer in North Yorkshire.

As we look to the year ahead in 2023 (we have already been working on our priorities and focus) we know that it will take time for NHS and social care to rebuild after the devastation that COVID-19, cutbacks and the staffing shortage have caused. Rest assured, we will continue to support and influence improvements in health and social care services and work closely with decision makers to help them achieve this.

As always, we encourage you to keep sharing your experiences with us so that we keep championing what’s important to you.