Keeping Patients at the Heart of Care; How Clinical Expertise Is Making Sure Community Voices Are Heard

A single question from a Healthwatch Cambridgeshire and Peterborough volunteer changed how Clinical Specialist Ellie Addison viewed healthcare data forever. Today, as Chair of the Healthwatch Fenland Health and Care Forum, she is helping ensure that local people’s experiences directly inform how services are designed – demonstrating how clinical expertise within NHS Supply Chain can positively influence communities, patients, and system partners.

The Healthwatch Fenland Health and Care Forum brings together members of the local community, voluntary sector organisations, NHS partners, and local authority representatives to create a safe and trusted space where people can openly share their health concerns, experiences, and priorities.

The forum plays an important role in:

• Turning lived experience into actionable insight for system partners.
• Enabling local people to discuss barriers such as patient transport, access to services, and care pathways.
• Highlighting the reality of accessing health and care services in a rural area such as the Cambridgeshire Fens.
• Ensuring issues affecting older people, disabled residents, and people with long‑term health conditions are properly understood.

A dementia specialist regularly attends, strengthening the forum’s ability to capture diverse and often under‑represented perspectives.

As Chair of the Healthwatch Fenland Health and Care Forum, Ellie plays a facilitative role – guiding discussion, offering clinical insight, and helping attendees navigate the system – while ensuring that actions are taken forward by the appropriate organisations.

Her clinical background allows her to interpret community experiences in context, clarify which services are responsible for follow‑up, and signpost patients and carers to the right support.

By maintaining clear boundaries and enabling Healthwatch Fenland Health and Care Forum, providers, the ICB, social care and Voluntary Community and Social Enterprises VCSE partners, to own their roles and responsibilities, she creates a collaborative space where community voices are heard and system partners engage constructively with local priorities.

Ellie began working with Healthwatch Cambridgeshire and Peterborough in 2020, during her time in the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). She reflects on the pivotal moment that reshaped her view of health data.

My journey into Healthwatch Cambridgeshire and Peterborough began in 2020 when I was working in the CCG, presenting data on falls in local care homes. I was confidently talking through the numbers, the trends, the targets – completely absorbed in the metrics. Then one of the Healthwatch Cambridgeshire and Peterborough volunteers asked a simple but powerful question about the person behind one of those falls.

It stopped me in my tracks. In that moment, I realised how easy it is in health and care to drift away from the people at the heart of the system. We get caught up in performance, finances, dashboards, and improvement plans, and sometimes forget that every data point is someone’s parent, partner, or friend.

That question brought me back to what matters: listening to people, understanding their experiences, and making sure their voices shape the services they rely on. I support Healthwatch Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and chair the Health and Care Forums because it keeps me grounded. Our patient forums in Fenland give local people a genuine voice. As Chair, I make sure every conversation turns lived experience into practical change for the services our communities rely on.

Ellie Addison, Clinical Specialist, NHS Supply Chain