Become a member of HUC
As a social enterprise, our ‘membership’ is drawn from all parts of the community. This enables us to be uniquely positioned to engage with all communities. Learn more about how you can become a member of HUC.
Supporting patients
We use regular patient, carer, professional and stakeholder communication, engagement and feedback to continue delivering a patient centred approach that traverses organisational boundaries, enabling seamless patient care. We have invited patients into our call centres, meeting staff and making their own observations. This approach has generated patient advocates who are knowledgeable about the service and tell others.
Through delivering services across demographically diverse counties, we are aware of language and cultural barriers and how to address them. We are experienced in providing healthcare services to communities where English is not their first spoken language. We provide interpretation services across all of our services, either telephone-based or in our treatment centres. Our NHS 111 Call Handlers and other healthcare professionals will identify a patient’s interpretation needs when they capture demographic data. We then contact Language Line and have a three-way conference phone call, ensuring the caller can give a true account of symptoms. If directly booking patients into another service, any language requirement is clearly flagged on the referral. We proactively recruit colleagues to reflect local communities and demographics of the population.
We work closely with relevant system partners, including appropriate VCFSE organisations, to engage with vulnerable communities. We also maintain strong relationships with local Healthwatch teams, who regularly share relevant survey findings, insight, and feedback. This enables us to utilise community perspectives to support ongoing engagement and continuous improvement across a range of communities and population groups.
At HUC, respect for our patients is embedded in our company values. We endeavour to make every reasonable appropriate adjustment to ensure our service is accessible for all patients.
If you have any issues accessing this website, please let us know at communications@huc.nhs.uk. Please note that we cannot guarantee the accessibility of third-party websites, documents and multimedia content that we may link to.
Our commitment
We are committed to providing a website that is accessible to everyone, regardless of technology or ability. We want all patients, carers, staff and partners to be able to use our website easily and confidently.
How accessible our website is
We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA standard, which is the recognised standard for accessibility across the NHS.
This means you should be able to:
- change colours, contrast levels and fonts using your device or browser
- zoom in up to 400% without the text becoming difficult to read
- navigate most of the website using a keyboard
- use speech recognition software
- listen to most content using a screen reader (such as JAWS, NVDA or VoiceOver)
We also try to write clearly so that our content is straightforward to understand.
Areas we’re still working on
We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible. This includes:
- some older documents (such as PDFs)
- some forms and interactive features
We are working to improve these areas through ongoing testing, content updates and staff training.
We are also seeking feedback from users, including people with lived experience and local voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCFSE) organisations, to help inform improvements. Please get in touch by emailing communications@huc.nhs.uk.