Agenda item

Report attached.

The Integrated Care Partnership (ICP) sought to address issues such as population growth, quality of service and financial issues. The ICP also aimed to allow more decision making to take place at a local level and ensure services were delivered in a more integrated, joined up way. This would avoid instances of, for example, patients having to give their details more than once during their care pathway.

It was accepted that recruitment and retention was a challenge for all partners involved. There was also a significant financial challenge facing the health economy, meaning it was important to encourage people to self-care where possible. The Partnership sought to join up services offered by the Council, Hospitals’ Trust and community service providers but the role of the community and voluntary sector also needed to be considered.

The localities would have a population of around 80,000 each and a locality design group included a broad range of stakeholders such as the Council, Havering CCG and Healthwatch. Stakeholders were keen that people should be involved in this different way of delivering services.

The north locality would focus on children’s services initially whilst the central area would investigate how delays in referral to treatment could be avoided and the southern locality would consider access to urgent and emergency care. The work on children’s services would focus on emotional health and wellbeing. The difficulties sometimes experienced in accessing child and adolescent mental health services would also be considered. It was planned for example for GPs to work with families and schools to arrange access to counselling. Referral to more formal mental health services would only be made at a later stage, if necessary.

Urgent and emergency care work would be linked to the intermediate care offer. It was aimed to divert people from attending A&E and to ensure that people spent as little time in hospital as possible. In order to improve outcomes, it was preferable to support people to stay at home.

For intermediate care, an integrated rehabilitation and reablement service had recently been launched and officers hoped the benefits of this would be seen within six months. It was hoped that this service would reduce duplication and hence benefit residents.

A joint commissioning board would be established across the 3 local boroughs and CCGs. A system programme delivery board would look at the CCG deficits and how to reduce these. It was emphasised that the localities work also involved other Council functions such as housing, benefits advice and careers advice.

The number of care visits in a person’s home depended on their assessment. This could be as many as 4 visits a day when a person was first discharged from hospital. Homecare was currently monitored via a swipe card system and the new service would also have a full monitoring mechanism for the quality of care.

The operational management of the integrated rehabilitation and reablement service would be undertaken by NELFT. Officers clarified that there were not currently any social workers in the service but this would be kept under review.

The Sub-Committee NOTED the report.