Issue - meetings

The Committee received a report presenting an update on the integration of community health and adult social care services delivered by the Community Health and Adult Social Care Service (Community Service) which held the commissioning responsibilities for all the statutory adult social services ensuring all requirements of the Local Authority including safeguarding, are enforced and also provided leadership for and operation of all the adult community health and statutory social care services operating in the Borough delivered through an alliance of several employers.  The Community Service was a critical mechanism to realising the shared vision for the wider health and social care economy and it was therefore essential that the service is focussed on wellbeing and prevention, enabling people to regain independence whilst targeting long-term support at those people with the most complex needs.

The emphasis for Phase 2 of integrating community services has therefore been focused on design and implementation of an integrated community service that would enable practitioners to focus on supporting people in their communities, avoid acute interventions and long-term community service dependency, reinforce a new culture of self-care, place and strength-based support, drive financial and demand efficiencies, and deliver better outcomes for residents and the economy as a whole.  The high level care and support pathway that it was envisaged would deliver this vision was illustrated, and support to provide a clear understanding of where the organisation needed to be to deliver this vision was being sought.

Alongside this work, the following were key areas of development –

·         Community enablement – to design and deliver an enablement model that building on the partially integrated crisis enablement team and further improve the referral pathway into enablement services;

·         Embedding integration – developing and embedding standard operating procedures for the integrated neighbourhood community teams;

·         Adults Targeted Model – designing and implementing a model for prevention and resident engagement to support people to self-care;

·         Streamlining governance and decision-making – while ensuring that the governance arrangements and requirements of each of the organisations involved were still met; and

·         Operational reform of services with known high risk concerns to ensure that we have strong and stable services are in operation ahead of transforming them to meet the refocused vision.

Other work being undertaken was the review of community health contracts transferred from Pennine Care Foundation Trust to the Oldham Care Organisation following recognition that the specifications were out of date, and the implementation of a redesigned safeguarding adults system.

A Member queried how changes to service delivery are communicated to service users and what feedback was received.  It was accepted that more work on communication needed to be done, in part because information governance and data sharing issues needed to be resolved, and in part in developing an identity for the new structure which Phase 2 would seek to resolve.

The role that the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) might play within this service model was queried.  Members were advised that early work seemed to be going well, NWAS being made aware  ...  view the full minutes text for item 11