The experiences of Solihull residents who try to access Urgent Care

Healthwatch Solihull investigated 422 Solihull residents’ experiences of trying to access urgent care. This report looks at what helped and/or hindered residents experiences trying to access urgent care and the impact such barriers have on their health, wellbeing and/or quality of life. The key topics that people told us about included feedback about the quality of communication, the distance to services, and waiting times.

Most of the urgent care services we heard about included A&E, NHS 111 and the ambulance service. The report also found that the most important thing for Solihull residents when choosing an urgent health service included:

• location (it is easy to access/close to get to/from).
• access a healthcare professional on the same day.

Many residents also said that the reason they choose an urgent care service was related to not being able to see their GP, in which case the person had to choose an alternative way of obtaining the urgent care they needed.

Healthwatch Solihull shared what we heard from patients with Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board (ICB) and University Hospital Birmingham (UHB). They acknowledged the need to improve on the issues we found during our investigation and they committed to improve services.