News and reports

Craniosynostosis is a rare and often underrecognised condition in which one or more of a baby’s skull plates fuse prematurely—typically before or shortly after birth—hindering normal skull and brain growth. The condition produces distinctive head shapes and may lead to elevated intracranial pressure or other complications if left untreated.

Diabulimia is a widely-used term to describe an eating disorder unique to people with type 1 diabetes (T1DM) who deliberately reduce or skip insulin to lose weight. In clinical language, it's increasingly referred to as type 1 diabetes with disordered eating (T1DE) or ED-DMT1.

Read more about our August 2025 Board meeting in public. This time the Board discussed changes to our Annual Business Plan and Research Programme, as well as taking a look at our recent contract monitoring submission.

Veterans, reservists, serving personnel and military families across Hertfordshire have told us about accessing healthcare and how the NHS can improve the support they provide.

Announcing our next AGM, where we will be feeding back on our impact and insights from the year and hearing a key note speech from Jo Marovitch, Chief Executive at Herts Mind Network titled: "Speaking from the Belly: Truth, Trust and Tenacity".

As a Healthwatch, we listen to the voices of people to learn about their healthcare experiences and champion for change.

In this report, we heard from refugees and asylum seekers, who face significant health inequalities – for example, they are five times more likely to have mental health support needs. They arrive here with significant trauma, which exacerbates their difficulties in accessing health and care services, in addition to the challenges faced by all Hertfordshire residents.

A statement from our Chair and CEO to the recent announcement regarding Healthwatch.

You may have heard the news this week that the Government intends to transfer the statutory functions of local Healthwatch to the NHS and councils.
We are waiting to find out more about what this means for us as an organisation, but for now our focus is on highlighting and celebrating the considerable positive impact we have had on local health and social care.

Information in easy-read format is being created to help people with learning disabilities better understand how their health data is used for NHS research.

Read more about our June 2025 Board meeting in public. This time our Board considered our role and approach during systems change, as well as our latest contract monitoring return.

A pilot scheme has been set up to allow selected dentists and opticians to offer patients a blood pressure check during their routine appointment. Thanks to our research, local NHS organisations were able to identify barriers and ways to encourage participation.

We asked prison leavers about their experiences of accessing drug and alcohol support services and what could be improved.