Health Consumers NSW: Great Aussie Charities You’ve Never Heard Of…

This week we spoke to advocates Health Consumers NSW, who focus on shaping health by raising the consumer’s voice to health workers and patients.

What do they do?

Most people find dealing with the health system to be a confusing and complicated business. We can change this by making sure that consumers of health services (patients, carers, and their families) are involved in decisions that affect them.

Health Consumers NSW works with health services to ensure that they involve consumers in their decision making, be that designing a new hospital or developing various health policies.

We also work with individual health consumers (patient, carers etc) to equip them to be heard and contribute.

The people of NSW deserve better. Health consumer engagement and listening to what the consumers really want is extremely important to achieve safe, quality, timely and affordable health care for all people in NSW. This care needs to be supported by accessible and easy-to-understand health information and systems.
Research shows great benefits to health systems, patients and even health staff when care is centred on patients and their support people. It results not only in better experiences and health outcomes for consumers, but even things like less re-admissions to hospitals and happier doctors and nurses.
We promote health consumer involvement in all areas, the individual level (patient-centred care), the systems level (Health Service delivery in NSW, patient involvement in research) and the political level (health policies) in NSW. The aim is to co-produce health services together with patients.
And while health consumer involvement is currently a great buzz-word, all too often it is still only lip-service and a tick-a-box exercise instead of real community and consumer involvement.

Where did it all begin?:

In late 2010, a tireless group of health consumer advocates in NSW established our organisation with a grant from the NSW Ministry of Health. These, mainly older, passionate ladies (and some men) fought for all health consumers in NSW to bring the State up to the level of most other Australian States who long have had a peak organisation for health consumers and their organisations. This enabled us to put health consumer involvement squarely on the map in NSW.

A day in the life at Health Consumers NSW:

There’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ day at Health Consumers NSW. We could be holding a training program with a group of health consumers who are eager to get more involved in consumer advocacy work; facilitating a workshop with a mix of health consumers and health workers on how to get consumers involved with the health service; or being a ‘match-maker’ and linking a consumer advocate with a health service looking for someone with their mix of skills and experience.

Impact Story:

Individuals in our health consumer representative network have achieved everything from making sure mental health patients had hot showers instead of cold ones in hospitals to influencing the direction of health research topics that are funded by taxpayers money.

What do you do with your donations?:

Our main income source is a NSW Health Ministry grant along with our income from trainings and events .

Donations will give us the opportunity to work more directly with consumers. We would be able to train more people, as well as support more consumers to be able to attend important health events and conferences where there are usually no consumer voices and where cost (registration fees, travel etc) often precludes consumers from being able to attend.

We are open to receiving donations by becoming a HCNSW member. Membership is free and is open to individuals and organisations. The broader our membership base, the more representative we can be and the more voices are heard in shaping health services in NSW.

Anybody interested in health consumer engagement who agrees to support our aims and objectives and lives in NSW can be a member.http://www.hcnsw.org.au/members.php

Are you tax deductible? Yes

Check out more on the website: http://www.hcnsw.org.au/

OR Facebook: www.facebook.com/HCNSW/