Role and purpose of Healthwatch Gateshead Committee
The main purpose of the Healthwatch Gateshead Committee is to act as an advisory body to deliver Healthwatch activities.
This includes to:
- oversee the strategic direction of Healthwatch Gateshead
- 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 Gateshead 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.
Mairi Cox
Mairi relocated to the North East in 2007 after completing a degree in youth and community work. She co-ordinated the planning, delivery and evaluation of community projects to improve health and social care outcomes for service users until 2010. Mairi qualified as a social worker the following year.
Following on from this, Mairi worked in a variety of statutory and non-statutory social work settings including homelessness, adult mental health and children and young people’s mental health. She is currently employed as a therapeutic social worker in a specialist service for those under 25 who have experienced trauma.
Mairi is passionate about improving outcomes and ensuring services meet the needs of those who use them. She is a keen advocate of service users’ needs. These values influenced her desire to join the Healthwatch Committee in 2020.
Shamshad Shah
Shamshad has worked both in the NHS and in the public sector. She has experience in facilitating agencies to come together to engage effectively and shape their services to ensure everyone has a complete journey to achieving wellbeing.
Dr Semande Ayihongbe
Dr Semande Ayihongbe has a background in legal education and research in various roles within higher education: Dedicated Personal Tutor working on projects to improve university student outcomes through enhancements in personal tutoring provisions, Associate Lecturer, Lecturer, Research Associate, and Tutor. In the past, she has also worked on IT projects within the NHS and within Local Authority legal services.
She joined the Committee for Healthwatch Gateshead to help promote better outcomes in health and social care services for the people of Gateshead (particularly, for underrepresented groups whose voices are seldom heard), drawing upon the experience gained from her work within the NHS and as an academic with expertise on issues at the intersection of Law and Medicine. By joining Healthwatch, she hopes to deepen her pre-existing knowledge of the challenges facing the NHS, the continued pressures on the finite NHS budget, and the increasing importance of the representation of the patient voice in the commissioning, delivery, and regulation of health and social care services.
Lyn Boyle
Alan David Guest
Alan has been a volunteer with Healthwatch Gateshead since May 2017, and as of 2024 has now joined as a committee member. In that time he has participated in many outreach sessions promoting Healthwatch in Gateshead and Newcastle, and taken advantage of training opportunities in topics including professional boundaries, communication skills and interviewing.
“I got to know I was autistic (diagnosed November 2020) through Healthwatch. When I found myself in conversation with a clinical psychiatrist who explained the symptoms and I couldn't help think ‘that's me’, ‘that's me’... and the rest was history!”
Peter Wilson
Privilege Garaba
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.