Across the country, hospitals and primary and community care organisations are working together to look at ways of delivering safe and effective care over seven days a week. This helps address the link between poorer outcomes for patients and the reduced levels of service provision at the weekend.
This new publication summarises service improvement achievements and potential challenges. While significant progress has been made we need to strive to find new and innovative solutions that are both clinically and financially sustainable to change delivery of diagnostic and scientific services to meet the needs of service users.
A new coalition of people and organisations across the health, social care and voluntary sectors has been launched to make person-centred coordinated care for people with long term conditions a reality.
The Coalition for Collaborative Care is using an approach called the House of Care to improve care and support planning for the 15 million people in England who have a long term condition. That means improving the relationship that people have in their day-to-day interaction with the NHS and social care so their care and support is organised around what matters to them.
There are many social enterprises throughout the North West, with several being set up during the NHS transition, when Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) were closed down and services transferred to other organisations.They helped to ensure that the provision of certain services were sustained and even extended. This overview is intended to give a snapshot of such organisations, including Bolton Community Practice Community Interest Company (CIC), Spiral Health CIC, Future Directions CIC and One to One Midwives.
This report sets out a framework and tools to help local service leaders improve the care they provide for older people across nine key components.
Whole-system changes are needed to deliver the right care at the right time, and in the right place, to meet older people’s care preferences and goals. The nine main components of care covered by the report are as follows.
Healthy, active ageing and supporting independence
Living well with simple or stable long-term conditions
Living well with complex co-morbidities, dementia and frailty
Rapid support close to home in times of crisis
Good acute hospital care when needed
Good discharge planning and post-discharge support
Good rehabilitation and re-ablement after acute illness or injury
High-quality nursing and residential care for those who need it
Choice, control and support towards the end of life
The final section of the report discusses how to make integrated care happen. Key issues across all components include the use of comprehensive geriatric assessment at the right time, and the effective provision of co-ordinated primary, community and social care services closer to home.
This practical guidance has been written to help commissioners, service providers, nurses, medical, and allied health professionals, understand the difference care and compassion can make to the service experience of frail older people, and also to the financial situation of health and social care organisations.
Full of useful supporting material and practical assistance, including, case studies from 14 sites around England, scales and the list of best interventions. Commissioners and providers should choose the best scales that they should use for their patient population. Teams in clinical commissioning groups and provider organisations should think about each of the interventions described and should see if they are implemented and if not, how they can be. It is crucuial at the start of implementing this pathway, to think about which outcomes need to be measured, thus ensuring that it is easy to identify where your interventions are beneficial or not. This will require strong communication channels and multidisciplinary team working and commitment by all involved in the care pathway.
Person-centred, individualised, personalised, patient-centred, family-centred, patient-centric and many other terms have been used to signal a change in how health services engage with people. This Health Foundation rapid review summarises research about measuring the extent to which care is person-centred.
Three key questions guided the review:
How is person-centred care being measured in healthcare?
What types of measures are used?
Why and by whom is measurement taking place?
The review signposts to research about commonly used approaches and tools to help measure person-centred care. It aims to showcase the many tools available.
Patients are increasingly seen as active partners in healthcare. While patient involvement in individual
clinical decisions has been extensively studied, no trial has assessed how patients can effectively be involved in collective healthcare decisions affecting the population. The goal of this study was to test the impact of involving patients in setting healthcare improvement priorities for chronic care at the community level. Finds that patient involvement can change priorities driving healthcare improvement at the population level.
Health care systems are not adapting to an ageing population with co-morbidities
People require co-ordinated care centred on them that are not fragmented
People are interested in their lives rather than health and care services, and it can be easy for
policy and policymakers to miss what matters most to ordinary people e.g. independence for older people
Policy ignores that most care is self care and people are drawn into acute services rather than treated where they want to be – at home.
Social care is under more strain than any other part of the system
Care needs to be co-ordinated around the whole persons needs particularly for older people, those with complex conditions and long term conditions.
A shift towards coordinated, person-centred care requires a fundamental shift in the way that health and care is delivered, and can’t be achieved within the existing fragmented system
Proposes a set of recommendations that will focus on helping people stay well, manage their conditions and
promote their independence; it suggests how incentives can be aligned across health and care organisations to encourage them to put people’s and encourages health and social care to work in partnership for their communities, without proposing expensive and distracting structural reorganisations.
Blog post that uses comparisons with the education sector to consider the prospects for franchising and hospital chains. It suggests the experience of the ‘turnaround’ teams in 2005/6 suggests the need for a ‘whole health economy approach’ alongside strong stakeholder engagement and performance management. It’s not obvious why a high-performing trust from another area would be best placed to do this.