Role and purpose of Healthwatch Newcastle Committee
The main purpose of the Healthwatch Newcastle Committee is to act as an advisory body to deliver Healthwatch activities.
This includes to:
- oversee the strategic direction of Healthwatch Newcastle
- prioritise work to be undertaken
- agree work plans based on issues raised and requests received from a wide variety of commissioning agents
- provide scrutiny and oversight, monitoring and reviewing progress against stated priorities and aims
- monitoring performance against key performance indicators
Would you like to join us?
We are looking for individuals with a passion for promoting better health and social care outcomes. Can you bring a cooperative and supportive approach? If you're ready to participate in discussions effectively, represent people's views professionally, work as part of a dynamic team, and champion organisational change and improvement, we want YOU! Please contact us if you’d like to know more.
Our Committee
Michael Brown
Healthwatch Newcastle Committee Chair
Michael has always lived in the North East and is retired after a 35 year career in local government. He held senior management roles in housing, adult social care commissioning, voluntary sector development and volunteering.
Michael has a particular interest in how to successfully engage people to influence policy and decision-making and the great challenge of integrating health and social care services. In his spare time Michael is a keen allotment holder, swimmer, and cyclist.
Feyi Awotona
Newcastle committee and board member Feyi Awotona, is a retired Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist with over 30 years experience in the NHS. Feyi is passionate about social justice and good governance. She believes that service users’ needs and their experience of using services should be at the heart of health and social care provision. Feyi also brings to the Board and Committee the perspective of the BME community on health and social care services and her experience from being Trustee of local Charities.
Dr Terry Bearpark
Terry joined the NHS in 1992 with responsibility for developing quality improvement in primary health care in Newcastle via clinical audit. As the remit expanded to include the whole picture of health in a primary care setting, she developed her interests in organisational, service and people training and development as part of the wider quality improvement agenda. She developed the Practice Development Group as a one-stop shop to support local GP practices in any aspect of their work. This eventually expanded to include North Tyneside practices. When this role ended, Terry moved to Teesside where she was responsible for learning and development across the fledgling Primary Care Trust.
Terry later moved to the School of Health and Social Care at Teesside University where her remit concentrated on innovation for quality development and improvement across health and social care including training, and also looking at small business setups. People, service and organisational development to ensure high quality health and care services remain her passion.
Alisdair Cameron
Alisdair Cameron has variously been an academic historian, a lawyer and a user of mental health services, in among stretches of generalised community activism. He is co-creator and co-director of the charity ReCoCo (www.recoverycoco.com) that mashes together bits of the NHS, great chunks of the voluntary sector, sprinkles on some community development and collectivism, then puts service users in charge and sees what happens. He is also Chair of Chilli Studios (formerly NAGAS), a trustee of RTRT and a board member of NSUN, the National Survivor User Network for mental health. He is also a guest lecturer for Northumbria, Newcastle, Teesside and Durham universities, responsible for various modules on involvement, engagement, Mad Studies, and mental health systems.
Nick Linfoot
Nick has spent his career in the Government, beginning in the prison and probation space where he worked on prisoner health policy, delivery and innovation. As a Type 1 Diabetic he is also very interested in improving outcomes for disabled individuals and their services. He has been involved in a number of charities, mainly focused on the health and legal space, from charities working with older people impacted by the criminal justice system, to dental provision and law centres. He is also an Economic and Social Research Council scholar, studying for his PhD studying health inequalities and data collection practices.
Amer Mirza
Amer has been involved in mental health and charitable organisations for 20 years. He has a keen interest in identifying ways to improve access and expedite solutions to attend to wellbeing.
He has also worked in Medico Legal which resulted in developing a template to speed up the process of psychological assessment to identify PTSD. These skills, experience and drive are why Amer became a committee member for Healthwatch Newcastle.
Amer currently works as a suicide prevention therapist at James Place, also works in schools as a mental health therapist. Community is at the heart of his passion. In the past has developed innovative ways to address food poverty for families in the West End of Newcastle.
Ann Wynn
Alex Hoole
Past Board papers
We make the papers for our public Board meetings available online. We also publish a summary of what was discussed. Check out our past meetings to read more.