Between April and June 2025, Healthwatch in Greater Manchester heard from 1,789 people through more than 130 engagement events across all ten boroughs. This feedback is brought together in our new Quarterly Insight Report “What the people of Greater Manchester are telling us“, which is submitted directly to NHS Greater Manchester’s Quality & Performance Committee to enable assurance, improvement, and accountability.
What people told us
The most common issues people raised were around:
- General practice – continued challenges with access, booking systems, and continuity of care, alongside positive stories of staff going the extra mile.
- Secondary care – long waits for appointments, repeated cancellations, and gaps in communication during discharge.
- Dentistry – persistent concerns about finding an NHS dentist, long waits, and affordability pressures.
- Mental health – significant delays in access to support, leaving people and families feeling isolated.
- Social care – delays in assessments, changes to care packages, and carers feeling excluded from planning.
Across all services, five clear themes emerged: Access, Equity, Quality, Care, and Compassion. People want services that are easier to reach, fairer for all communities, consistently high in quality, delivered with dignity, and shaped by patient voice.
Why this matters
Every piece of feedback represents a real person’s experience. By gathering and sharing these insights, Healthwatch in Greater Manchester ensures that local voices shape system level decisions. This quarter’s recommendations call for:
- Lived experience to be treated as equal to clinical and performance data in decision-making.
- Improved access, especially in GPs and NHS dentistry.
- Services that embed equity and meet the needs of marginalised groups.
- Better coordination and continuity across services.
- Compassionate communication as the norm, not the exception.
Response
“Quality and Performance Committee (QPC) were appreciative of the issues raised in your Q1 report to enable the experience of patients to inform the strategic approach to provider oversight. We discussed that the CNO report and Performance report presented at each public QPC provide an update on the assurance mechanisms that the ICB has in place. The ICB assurance mechanism of care provided is that each NHS Trust has its own Provider Oversight Meetings (POMs).
The POMS are informed by a ‘sub meeting’ that considers a wide range of contextual meeting including performance, finance, workforce, quality and contracting information. There is also consideration of any improvement tools such as rapid quality review meetings (targeted support where performance isn’t meeting the required standard), contractual levers (such as the issuing of contract performance notices), and escalation of unresolved issues to the POM for an executive-to-executive discussion. In response to the reforms, and the further development of the role of the ICB as strategic commissioner, the ‘sub meeting’ is to become an internal ICB contract review meeting to clarify the discussion needed with each provider.
The above assurance mechanism provides a robust framework to follow up on the issues raised in your report.
Therefore, the intention is to submit the findings and recommendations set out in the Q1 report to each Trust’s contract review meeting which is expected to add further depth to the accountability provided by each provider. This will enable specific progress to be monitored. Any future reports provided by Healthwatch will be added into this mechanism.“