05 Strategic partner updates June 2015

Thu,4 June 2015
News

Health and Social Care update from our work as Strategic Partner to the Department of Health, NHS England and Public Health England

Disability Rights UK heads up a user-led consortium as one of 22 strategic partners in the voluntary sector. Our name is ‘Win-Win Alliance – disabled people leading change’. This programme is commissioned by our system partners, the Department of Health, NHS England and Public Health England. As strategic partner we are well placed to raise particular challenges facing our members of disabled people’s user-led organisations. We also ensure that information and opportunities to engage with system partners reach our members through this and other updates, forums, meetings and discussions, and we regularly inform about funding opportunities (which you may pursue with or without Disability Rights UK). This month we particularly invite our members’ contributions to a new research & development project on ‘user-driven commissioning. For any comments and/or ideas about how to strengthen ‘disabled people leading change’, please get in touch with Bernd.Sass@disabilityrightsuk.org 

With some support of the Strategic Partnership Programme and an ESRC grant we want to focus on ‘what makes change happen?’ The special thing about this initiative is that it has both development and research elements – so we can help make things better and then study the impact that this is having. If we co-produce projects, can we disabled people have a positive impact on professionals and on what they are doing? How does this happen?

Maybe your DPULO is already involved with the local Clinical Commissioning Group or Adult Social Care department – say on co-producing experience and outcome measures that would be written into provider contracts to determine (to an extent) the payment of these providers. Or peer support is really about to take off from a well resourced and supported basis in your local area?

If you would like to work with us on any such projects in the future or simply showcase what you have done, please get in touch with Bernd Sass at Disability Rights UK bernd.sass@disabilityrightsuk.org . Or call him directly on 07906 521536. 

Further specific news  

New ministers in the Department of Health

Please note an update on ministers in the Department of Health in the new government:

Jeremy Hunt remains Secretary of State for Health.

Jane Ellison remains Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Public Health.

Earl Howe has been moved as the minister in the House of Lords, to be replaced by David Prior, who has stepped down as chairman of CQC in order to become a minister.

Two new ministers have been appointed in the new government: Ben Gummer as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Care Quality. Alistair Burt as Minister of State for Community and Social Care.

Our Place Applications Open

This Support Programme provides areas looking to adopt an Our Place approach to service transformation with grants, direct support and shared learning and is open to VCS groups, local authorities, public bodies and parish or town councils.

The deadline for applications to be part of the 15/16 cohort of the Our Place Support Programme has been extended. The closing date for applications is now 5 June, more details can be found on the Our Place section of the My Community website:

http://mycommunity.org.uk/programme/our-place/?_a=funding

About Our Place:

The Our Place way of working means putting the community at the heart of decision making and bringing together the right people - councillors, public servants, businesses, voluntary and community organisations, and the community themselves - to change service delivery and revolutionise the way a neighbourhood works.

12 areas pioneered this approach throughout 2012/13 (under the name Neighbourhood Community Budgets), looking at tackling issues including youth unemployment, health inequalities and improving public space.  They brought together partnerships who were led by town councils, local authorities, housing associations and voluntary and community sector organisations.

Building on the successes and lessons learnt from the pioneer areas, £4.3m was made available for a support programme in 14/15 to roll the approach out to at least 100 further Our Place areas.  The support programme was run on the Department’s behalf by Locality and provides areas with a bespoke package of grants, direct support and shared learning.

118 areas completed the programme and submitted an Operational Plan – detailing their resources, partnerships, implementation outlines and crucially business cases – to DCLG by May 2015.   A similar programme is being run for 15/16, aiming to recruit up to 100 new areas who are interested in rolling out an Our Place approach to service transformation in their neighbourhood. 

Seeking feedback on effective engagement with the community and voluntary sector in EDS2 implementation
Race Equality Foundation, in partnership with LGBT Foundation, Disability Rights UK and Mens Health Forum, have been funded by NHS England to produce a best practice guide for engaging with the community and voluntary sector in the implementation of the latest version of the Equality and Diversity System (EDS2).

To develop the guide, a survey has been constructed in consultation with service users, NHS organisations and voluntary and community organisations to identify good practice examples of effective engagement with voluntary and community organisations.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RkNk-F4qWe9PVJVe8lNiZcTX2Wp_0ZiaGg4gBTGQ8Ic/viewform

We are seeking to hear from organisations working to effectively implement EDS2 with examples of good practice. These examples will be assessed and developed into case studies for inclusion in the guide, and will help us to further develop criteria for assessing good practice.  Please do forward the survey on to any other interested parties. 

GP Champions Toolkit

The Association for Young People’s Health has published a new GP Champions Toolkit for General Practice. It has been endorsed by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and contains actions all GPs could carry out to improve primary care services for young people. The work, which was carried out in partnership with Youth Access and the RCGP Adolescent Health Group, was funded by the Department of Health and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. The work that led to the development of the Toolkit concluded that collaboration between GPs and the voluntary sector was highly successful, although the model of work was different in each of 10 pilot sites. Joined-up working was most effective where new services were commissioned and fully funded by external bodies, as in Liverpool where the CCG funded a new drop-in service, and in South London, where the LeSoCo College of further education provided resources for weekly pop-up GP clinics on its three sites. But it also uncovered worrying trends - a significant proportion of young people weren't registered with a GP and telephone triage systems for appointments were a barrier for young people.  

The read more and to download the GP Champions Toolkit for General Practice, go to: http://www.ayph.org.uk/5/our-work/71/gp-champions-project/ 

Case studies on public consultation

NHS Clinical Commissioners has published a paper on involving the public in service reconfiguration programmes. http://www.networks.nhs.uk/networks/news/public-consultation-case-studies

Lower UK cancer survival linked to delays in referring patients for tests
GPs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are slower to refer people with possible cancer for tests or to a specialist than those in comparable countries, according to new research published in British Medical Journal (BMJ) http://www.networks.nhs.uk/networks/news/lower-cancer-survival-in-uk-linked-to-delays-in-referring-patients-for-tests 

Innovation Test Beds search extended

This programme, which opened on 26 March, is inviting expressions of interest from innovators from any sector in the UK and internationally who want to test their ideas to deliver health services in better ways at scale, and in a real clinical setting. Health and social care innovators now have until 12 June to express an interest in being part of the Test Beds Programme.

Through the programme, and with the support of the 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), innovators will partner up with NHS and social care sites to trial new technologies, digital services and other innovations in service delivery with the potential to bring big benefits to patients. 

In practice, a test bed site could mean equipping patients with wearable technology, combined with a new working pattern for clinical and nursing staff, all with the aim of helping people manage long-term conditions, address issues early and reduce preventable trips to hospital.

Over the summer, AHSNs will identify NHS and social care organisations as potential ‘test bed sites’ which will be matched to appropriate innovators. The partnerships will then receive national support to implement high potential innovations that respond to local clinical needs.

More information on the programme is available at: www.england.nhs.uk/testbeds. There are also a number of opportunities to find out more about the programme and ask questions. More details here: http://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/innovation/test-beds/find-out-more/

Matching health with growth: How European Structural and Investment Funds can support local health economies

There is a briefing which outlines the background to the new round of European Structural and Investment Funds, including what the funds support, the main opportunities for the NHS in England and how to access the funding. This will be of interest to voluntary sector organisations working with NHS organisations, national bodies and regional organisations, such as academic health science networks, local education, public health and training boards and health and wellbeing boards.

http://nhsconfed.org/~/media/Confederation/Files/public%20access/Matching%20health%20with%20growth%20final%2019%20March.pdf

This case study (from the briefing) outlines how a partnership could work: 

Using ESIF to broaden access to healthcare jobs

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust has utilised ERDF and ESF extensively in the past decade. In particular, over £6 million of ESIF funding has gone into the design and development of their learning hub. The hub is a purpose-built training centre to broaden access to entry-level healthcare jobs for unemployed people, especially those living in the most disadvantaged parts of the city. University Hospitals Birmingham manages the hub on behalf of the whole local health and care sector, with key posts seconded from a number of partner organisations, such as Jobcentre Plus, Birmingham City Council and Balfour Beatty.

The hub operates about a dozen separate training programmes, some of which target specific groups such as young people not in education, employment or training; those over the age of 50; the homeless young;

refugees; and those with physical or learning difficulties. Training includes inductions and placements in a ward, technical or administrative area, or a specific focus on jobs that are about to be advertised, such as auxiliary nurses and healthcare assistants. More than 1,800 unemployed people have been helped into work to date, making it one of the largest employer-led training programmes in the city. For more information on this particular project, contact David Taylor, Head of Regeneration, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, David.Taylor@uhb.nhs.uk 

Our work on Equality and Diversity Council’s subgroup on leadership and workforce – a short note on co-production

DRUK’s Win-Win Alliance is part of the Equality and Diversity Council’s subgroup on leadership and workforce. Here we promote co-production with individual disabled people and DPULOs (‘why and how lived experience matters’) to key national leaders: listen - value - invest.

There is now a common understanding of the need to focus on co-production in the sense of embarking on involvement as a journey beyond one-off consultation meetings. Some of the key (yet still often missing) words are ‘meaningful’ and ‘sustainable’ involvement with ‘impact’. Co-production means breaking through the boundaries between staff and patients to co-deliver agreed health and wellbeing outcomes, and this lever for improvement and equality is most underused. For example, making peer support an integrated element of commissioned care pathways would immediately bring lived experience into the focus as an essential part of workforce and leadership in the NHS. There are also tensions between medical and social aspects in any care pathway, eg clinicians not valuing the importance of patient input into diagnosing and managing a longterm condition which regularly results in misdiagnoses. Patients are also not able to easily feed back information that is medically relevant, such as a change in medication. Local community or care navigator models cannot plug this gap – they are supposed to signpost to other services when in the case of peer support there are often none.

There needs to be a wider discussion as to why and how lived experience must be integral to leadership and workforce issues in the NHS and social care as well. 

New CQC guide: what to expect from a CQC inspection

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has produced a new, short guide for providers of adult social care services on what to expect from a CQC inspection

http://www.cqc.org.uk/content/adult-social-care-providers#what%20to%20expect

Specific versions of the guide are available for community adult social care services, residential adult care and hospital services. 

Supporting People with Learning Disabilities and/or Autism to engage with the Care Quality Commission (CQC)

Together with our partners in the Win-Win Alliance we have been asked by the CQC to promote the standards of care, signal inspections and encourage feedback on experiences of care from people with learning disabilities, their families and carers across all services. It is important to stress that this work is about two-way communications (promoting CQC products AND gathering people’s views and experiences of services). Wherever possible, we want these communications to be long-term – not one off consultations on the internet or during events. There will be a particular focus on learning disability specialist services and community-based social care services. If you know of (or are part of any group) that meets locally or regionally and may be interested in these discussions we very much look forward to hearing from you. Please get in touch with Bernd.Sass@disabilityrightsuk.org or 07906 521536. 

Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards - the Care Quality Commission (CQC) would like to hear about people’s experiences

The Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards are part of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA), and are used to protect the rights of people who lack the ability (mental capacity) to make certain decisions for themselves.

The Care Quality Commission monitors the operation of the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards in England and reports on this each year. 

As with previous years, CQC want to understand better the experiences of people who are or have been subject to the Safeguards and their families, to help inform reporting for 2014/15.

CQC are calling for examples for the year 2014/15 which will tell them about the experiences of the person at the centre of the process. They would like to hear about cases where the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards worked well for the person and cases where they did not work so well. They would also be interested to receive any examples of good and poor practice regarding the use of the Safeguards in care homes or hospitals, including whether and how the relevant person’s perspective was taken into account.

It is also particularly helpful to know:

  • was the person and others concerned with their care, involved in the decision
  • did someone help them to understand the reason for the deprivation of liberty
  • if they were unhappy with the decision did they have a representative to support them to appeal against it
  • was the decision kept under review and the restrictions reduced or removed as soon as possible. 

CQC would like to receive any information during May and June and you can send it to engagementandinvolvement@cqc.org.uk . They would be really grateful if you could share this with other organisations and partners who you feel may be able to help us. Hearing from families, carers and advocates is also enormously helpful – as they can share their experiences of supporting loved ones who have been or continue to be subject to the Safeguards. CQC are also contacting other colleagues including IMCAs around the country.