In the run up to winter, local health and care partners want to make sure they do everything they can to prevent avoidable illness.

Not enough people are taking advantage of a free flu vaccination programme to help protect them and we want to understand what, if anything, we can do differently to make sure the more vulnerable groups are protected from potentially more severe disease.

The health system is still battling the coronavirus and while the flu vaccine will not protect from getting coronavirus, it will reduce flu-related illness and ease the stress on health services during this pandemic. The Government is also planning to offer the flu vaccine to more people in the population including everyone over 50. That’s why it’s important that we understand your feelings around the flu vaccination.

In the past few weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed all our lives considerably, transformed our views of what is important, and posed a considerable challenge to our health and care services.

As part of our ongoing work to respond to COVID-19, we asked Virtual Views panel members to share their experiences of the pandemic and the impact of changes we have had to make to how residents access health and care services as a result.

COVID-19 is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future, so we need to change the way we provide services and ensure that these changes meet the needs of residents over the coming months. The feedback you shared with us as part of this survey will help support us to make decisions and design new ways of working in response to the pandemic

The survey ran from the 1st October to the 19th October 2020 and captured local opinion on changes to how and where outpatient services are delivered. Responses were received from across the mid and south Essex areas.

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