Agenda item

Integrated Commissioning - Progress Update

Report includes reference to and an update in respect of the recommendation to Cabinet from the Adult Care and Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee, 28 November 2017 (Minute 34 attached), reference Cabinet Item ‘Integrated Commissioning Hub’, 27 November 2017 (Minutes 62 & 66 refer).

 

Minutes:

Councillor-Chris_Jones LATEST - To be used in Cabinet reports

Councillor Christine Jones, Cabinet Member for Social Care and Health, said:

“Wirral residents expect and deserve a first rate health and social care services. When residents become ill, when they are frail or otherwise in need of support, that is when public services are supposed to pull together and help them.

“Boundaries between agencies – primary, social, acute, or community care – are entirely meaningless to residents, and often serve to slow down or complicate the services people need. Integration breaks down those barriers. It helps our residents benefit from joined up, tailored health and social care – delivered more quickly, more easily and more efficiently than ever before.

“Creating a fully integrated health and social care service also helps us to create a stronger local NHS. Extensive reorganisations and changes over recent years have left us with a complex system which is difficult to navigate – our proposals in Wirral will help simplify the system, making it easier for our residents to get NHS and social care services when and where they need them.”

 

Councillor Christine Jones introduced a report, which provided Cabinet with an update on the progress of the NHS and Social Care Integration programme(s) which were currently underway and in development and responded to the scrutiny request for publication of a due diligence report focussed on potential risks of pooling resources.

 

It was recommended to Cabinet that this report should be released, but that the sensitive nature of its contents precluded immediate publication in the public interest. Mitigations against those risks needed to be developed as part of the preparation of a section 75 agreement for the pooling of funds. Year one arrangements would include the running of a large part of potential pooled funding in shadow form, in order for those mitigations to be tested. Therefore, Cabinet was recommended to instruct officers to release the report during the summer of 2018, subject to the public interest concerns easing as appropriate mitigations were developed, agreed and put in place.

 

Wirral Council was working with the Council’s colleagues in the NHS to create a more joined up, stronger and more efficient health and social care service for Wirral residents. The Council’s social care service for older people was already fully integrated with the NHS Community Trust, providing Wirral’s older residents with a better, more seamless service than ever before. 

 

The Council was also developing a proposal to integrate its mental health and disability service with Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Trust, again to provide people with a better, more seamless service which was easier to use and enabled residents who needed support to enjoy a better service.

 

Another major integration programme involved Wirral Council and Wirral NHS Clinical Commissioning Group pooling its resources to create an integrated commissioner for Wirral, with shared governance, to ensure NHS and care and wellbeing resources went further – enabling the Council to strengthen Wirral’s local NHS and social care services.

 

The integration programmes were designed to support many of the Pledges, in particular: ‘Older people live well, ‘Wirral residents live healthier lives’ and ‘People with disabilities live independently’.

 

Councillor Phil Davies welcomed the report and restated one of the founding core principles of the NHS which was for free healthcare at the point of use.

 

RESOLVED: That:

 

(1)  the progress made towards integration between NHS and social care services to date, be noted;

 

(2)  the principles set out in the report as appropriate to guide the further work on developing integrated services and pooled funds, be endorsed;

 

(3)  the proposal set out in Paragraph 3.7 of the report relating to the Price Waterhouse Cooper report on the Integrated Commissioning Hub, be agreed;

 

(4)  officers be instructed to bring further reports to Cabinet in the near future on the ongoing work to integrate services with colleagues in the NHS.

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