Leadership for Personalised Care Case Study: Lee, Place Based Partnership Programme Director
Background and context
Lee is the Bassetlaw Place-Based Partnership Programme Director within the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire ICB. She is responsible for overseeing the integration and service improvement programmes across Bassetlaw Place Partnership. Due to its rural location, rapid house building and poor transport links, a high proportion of residents have limited access to public services and experience high levels of health inequality.
Along with colleagues from the Local Authority, Primary Care and the voluntary and community sector, Lee took part in the regional Leadership for Personalised Care programme in 2021. While personalisation was already on the agenda for Bassetlaw’s place partnership prior to the programme, taking part provided a timely opportunity to collaborate as an integrated team to promote personalised care as a core shared ethos and develop the agenda locally.
The impact of the programme
Taking part in the programme enabled Lee and her colleagues to dedicate time to meet regularly, enabling the team to develop closer working relationships and develop shared vision for personalisation outcomes. She feels that the programme’s content helped improve their understanding of the theoretical principles of personalisation and the methods of application as part of system change across organisations. The content input and protected time to be together enabled the team to discuss the future roll out of personalisation within Bassetlaw and how to work towards delivering a truly person centred, personalised, approach to service redesign and co-production of services.
The personalisation journey
The team in Bassetlaw wanted to deliver an integrated service that provides accessible, wrap-around support to young adults within a small town. They envisaged this to be a physical ‘one stop shop’ that provides physical and mental health support, employment support and general advice for people living locally. They hoped to deliver this by drawing upon a variety of skills and service offers from local community groups as well as statutory bodies.
After the programme, Lee and colleagues established a personalisation partnership group including representatives from primary care, statutory bodies and stakeholders from a range of organisations providing support across Bassetlaw. This group meets regularly to discuss the progress of each organisation, and Bassetlaw’s ongoing journey of embedding personalisation. All members agreed in principle to a partnership charter, agreeing to only engage in new initiatives collectively to ensure that all local services deliver the same level of personalisation.
‘…The council was signing up to a mental health prevention concordat… we knew nothing about it. They got in touch and all of a sudden that signature and sign up expanded… the council said ‘not only will we sign up to this, the partnership will sign up to this.’
‘The wider Bassetlaw partners have also come together to sign up to a tobacco control concordat rather than any one organisation signing up to it’
The personalisation partnership identified an ex-mining town in the north of Bassetlaw as the target location to pilot their wrap-around service based on feedback received by a local councillor from local community members. The town has pockets of severe deprivation, with 42 per cent of residents having a diagnosed mental health condition. The personalisation partnership engaged with a newly opening Youth Hub, initially established by the Department for Work and Pensions to increase young people’s access to employment support. The partnership agreed the Hub was the perfect place to base the ‘one stop shop’. The partner approach expanded the service offered to include individualised support services. Here, young people from the local community can now access a wide variety of personalised support provided by 8 different organisations.
The Youth Hub is open every Tuesday for young people living locally and can be used anonymously on a drop-in basis to access a wide range of mental and physical health and wellbeing services, employment support and general advice. A short exit interview was undertaken with the community on the day of its opening, this suggested highly positive responses from community members.
‘We went on this journey of bringing together a whole host of agencies that could be there on the same day that DWP was in. So people had access to mental health support, they’ve got the physical health support, they’ve got housing in there, health prevention services. There was just a host of partners within a town hall space.’
To further build trust with the communities, some of the partners piloted a smaller Pride event in the area where the Youth Hub had been established, engaging with local young people and communities to co-produce this. The event was successful with partners planning a larger event for 2023. Twelve partners contributed to a community event ‘healthy Sunday’ that included information on support services available within Bassetlaw Place, mental health and wellbeing information, provided defibrillator demonstrations and rapid health checks. Over 300 people interacted with the partnership group and engaged with the demonstrations. More of these community events will be planned across the Bassetlaw area.
‘We got almost all our [community and voluntary sector] partners out at Pride offering bags with support information and sharing what services they offer locally…Partners also attended Healthy Sunday this community event included showing people how to use the defib… we had a footfall of 300 and of that 50 had rapid health checks…’
The future and impact of personalisation
The steps taken by the partnership have improved local access to services for young people, helping reduce the time and money spent on using often unreliable transport to engage in employment, health and other services in the wider Bassetlaw area. They hope that this will support a decline in health inequality in the local area.
The personalisation partnership group have noticed an improvement in community cohesion, achieved through the increasing collaboration between organisations. The community is now building on this successful collaborative approach and co-developing new solutions to address local concerns in relation to the cost of living crisis. This has included personalised support to tackle live issues impacting local people, such as creating winter warm spaces, additional food banks and school uniform swap sites.
As the personalisation journey continues, the personalisation partnership group hope to roll out a similar version of the Youth Hub aimed at those aged 50+ to ensure this population also has regular, local access to services and further reduce health inequalities.