Healthwatch gives people across England a new way to engage with their local health and social care services.
Every voice counts when it comes to shaping the future of health and social care, and improving it for today. Everything that local Healthwatch does will bring the voice and influence of local people to the development and delivery of local services.
Local Healthwatch Visual Brand Guidelines
We need Healthwatch to make as big an impact on the public as possible. People in local communities need to be able to engage quickly and easily with their local Healthwatch and understand what it can help them with. They need to understand that Healthwatch England is there at the national level, acting on their behalf and giving local Healthwatch collective power and voice.
Healthwatch has so many different audiences, from local authorities to central Government; health and social care professionals to local people; from the people who use services now, to those who might need them in future. It’s all about services that are more accountable to local people, and more responsive to the needs of local communities.
So at the heart of the Healthwatch brand is the idea of ‘voice’, ‘dialogue’, and ‘communication’. We spent months consulting the people that Healthwatch needs to engage with to help us define these ideas and the result is a brand that will make what we’re all about clear to everyone who needs to engage with Healthwatch, especially patients, people who use social care services, and the wider public.
Over a period of 6 months, we held workshops and consultations and engaged with over 600 people in research who helped us define these ideas. Face-to-face in 17 focus groups across the country, over the phone and online, we captured the views and responses of key stakeholders and audiences, from the people commissioning Healthwatch to the people who will run and use it.
The visual system that brings this concept to life is flexible and coherent so it will help carry the meaning and vision of Healthwatch in whatever form we need it to. From the poster in the GP’s surgery to the annual report for Parliament. At a local level it will look and feel practical and dynamic. At the national level, authoritative and influential.
The first challenges for Healthwatch will be public awareness, public understanding, and public engagement. Healthwatch has to be visible, distinctive and elevant. We want to make sure that the Healthwatch brand quickly becomes a familiar sight in local communities.
How each local Healthwatch executes their individual branding is up to them. The visual system presented here is flexible enough to allow each organisation to cultivate its own particular personality to reflect the needs of its own local area, which will be diverse and unique to that place. Healthwatch England is providing the supporting materials that will make this possible. But having one unifying identity across the whole of the Healthwatch network, the same core logo, colour palette and core messages, will strengthen and amplify the power of the brand at both national and local level.
Both Healthwatch England and each local Healthwatch organisation will be able to use this unifying brand to support the specific communication of their particular key messages, whilst cultivating their unique and separate identities.
Clearly linking the national and local visual identities will help us to more quickly establish the significance of Healthwatch in local communities.
That’s why brand and identity is so important.
For patients, professionals and the public, being visible, both in local communities and at a national level, will be one of the surest signs that Healthwatch is ‘doing its job’.