Re-thinking short term services

Almost a hundred colleagues from across health, social care and voluntary sector organisations, alongside patients, came together on Wednesday, 22 March to rethink how we can improve short-term support to prevent people from needing to go into hospital or get to a place they call home sooner.

Opened by the partnership's Senior Responsible Officer and KCHFT Chief Executive Mairead McCormick, Kent County Council’s Corporate Services Director Richard Smith and EKHUFT's new Director of Strategy Ben Stevens, the trio talked about working shoulder-to-shoulder to unblock the barriers that mean people spend too long in a hospital bed.

Director of Integration Liz Sargeant went through the principles of putting patients at the centre, asking what matters to them and designing services which always say ‘yes’ alongside working across organisational boundaries.

She said: “What’s clear is there is a huge passion to do things differently, but what is also clear is there are a lot of rules that stop organisations working together and we repeatedly duplicate.

“We agreed we can assess people too many times, so having a trusted assessment is vital, not every organisation knows the full range of support each other provides or how to access it, we need pooled budgets and an IT system that gives one view of people’s care, so we all know what support we are providing.

“As part of the next steps, we will be holding a marketplace event to bring everyone together again and we also want to hear about small tests of changes, where people are starting to unblock the barriers we are putting in place.”

• Learning from the workshop will be shared shortly, alongside a date for the next event.
• More information about the East Kent Health and Care Partnership.