Leading the way on Health & Social Care

Achieving the ambitions set out in The Strategic Framework for Improving Health in the South West 2008/09 to 2010/11 cannot be achieved by the NHS alone.

Patients with long term conditions, such as dementia or respiratory disease, or patients who want to be cared for at home instead of spending unnecessary time in hospital because care packages cannot be readily found for them, rely upon health and social care teams working together to provide a single service that supports them to stay as well as they can as close to home as possible.

We know that not only could tens of thousands of patients benefit from improved quality of service through better health and social care co-ordination, but by making the changes to improve how different teams and agencies work together up to £150 million could be saved across the region simply by being more productive, which could in turn be reinvested in new and emerging services to continuously improve the quality of care we offer.

Over the last year, the South West Strategic Health Authority has provided intensive support to six local health and social care partnerships to help to identify where and how they could work closer together for the benefit of patients and service users.

Focusing on preventing falls, providing better support to patients with respiratory disease, identifying and supporting previously undiagnosed people with early stage dementia and stopping people from staying in hospital unnecessarily,  we’ve worked with local health and social care teams to develop new approaches to delivering care in these areas, and in just six to eight week periods, working those ideas into fully developed business cases to get new services off the ground and test how effective they are in delivering higher quality care for patients and service users.

For example, in Torbay, where they have tested redesigning the hospital discharge team on one ward to help ensure patients with complex needs can be discharged from hospital earlier where appropriate, the maximum length of stay has already fallen by more than 1 day, there have been 83 bed days freed up and there has been a 30 per cent reduction in referrals to the Hospital social work team.

The Care Trust have already identified that this approach, adopted across the borough, would lead to a significant improvement in the quality of care for patients and free up at least £1 million funding for reinvestment in care.

Each of the pilots that have been run through the health and social care integration programme have now been tested in two health and social care communities, and a ‘how-to guide’ for each project has been produced to enable other partnerships across the region to adopt these new approaches and make similar improvements for their patient populations.

Throughout the programme, the South West Strategic Health Authority has run a series of Academies for health and social care leaders across the region, working to understand how to identify and eradicate the barriers that prevent health and social care working better together around patients and service users.

On the back of this work we’ve published Integrating Care in the South West – a handbook for Improvement, which identifies 10 Golden Rules for integrated care, which describes the competency indicators for improving integration. Health and social care teams have already started to assess themselves against which competencies they need to improve to deliver better integrated care.

The How To Guides and the Handbook for Improvement will be available at the seminar being hosted by NHS South West at the Innovation Expo in London at 4pm on Thursday 18th June - Click here to download a copy now