Joined-up services for Liverpool and Sefton patients move a step closer
29/04/2016
Plans to create more joined-up NHS services closer to where people live have moved a step closer for patients in Liverpool and Sefton.
Three NHS organisations have been shortlisted to join together more out-of-hospital services from April 2017.
The move is critical to sustaining the improvements made to the area’s community health services over the last two years, and empowering nurses, doctors, and other care professionals to work together as joined-up teams in neighbourhoods across Liverpool and Sefton.
The change follows Liverpool Community Health’s decision in January 2015 to halt plans to become a Foundation Trust and instead focus on hiring extra nurses and providing better out-of-hospital care across the city.
The steps to safeguard these improvements, by developing more joined-up NHS care as part of at least one new health service organisation, are in line with a big plan for the NHS over the rest of the decade.
The health service’s master-plan, the NHS Five Year Forward View, calls for more integrated services outside hospitals to better meet the needs of the increasing numbers of people with more than one long-term health condition.
Over the last twelve months, Liverpool Community Health has been working with the area’s Clinical Commissioning Groups, NHS England, local authorities and NHS Improvement (formerly the NHS Trust Development Authority) to explore the different options.
As part of this work, other local NHS Trusts were invited to enter the first stage of two big NHS-only selection processes (one for Liverpool and one for Sefton) to identify the right partners to work with the area’s community health services from April 2017.
Interested Trusts had to set out why they would be best-placed to take on community health services and ensure they are more integrated with other health and care services in the future.
The organisations shortlisted to run more joined-up community health care for patients in Liverpool and Sefton from April 2017 are:
LIVERPOOL
• Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, working in partnership with the Liverpool GP Provider Organisation and Liverpool City Council.
• 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.
• Mersey Care NHS Trust, working in partnership with Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
SEFTON
• Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, working in partnership with the Liverpool GP Provider Organisation and Liverpool City Council.
• 5 Boroughs Partnership NHS Foundation Trust.
• Mersey Care NHS Trust.
In the autumn (2016), a final NHS-only selection process will choose either one or two of the shortlisted-organisations to run services in Liverpool and Sefton from April 2017.
Carole Panteli, Liverpool Community Health NHS Trust’s interim Director of Nursing, said: “In order to maintain these improvements and take them to the next level, we need to forge joined-up teams of health and care experts who can respond quickly to the needs of people who are most at risk of being admitted to hospital unnecessarily.
“Without this change next year, we will see teams increasingly being pulled from pillar to post, and patients and families consigned to a revolving door of hospital admissions and reliance on already overstretched acute services.
“Joining forces with other out-of-hospital care experts will enable us to create at least one, and possibly two, new NHS organisations of equal partners who, together, will be greater than the sum of their parts.”
In March (2016), Liverpool Community Health published an independent Quality, Safety and Management Assurance Review which showed that the way the Trust went about its bid to become a standalone Foundation Trust had been one of the factors behind an unsafe drive for savings and a chronic shortage of frontline clinical staff which regulators identified in January 2014.
The report also found that the Trust’s services have turned an important corner since changing direction two years ago and investing heavily in safe staffing levels, with more than 150 nurses, health visitors and other clinicians recruited.