Sheffield organisations pitch £260m 'vanguard' care plan

Sheffield Clinical Commissioning Group and Sheffield City Council aim to redesign services around “increasing the availability and access to a wider range of integrated primary and community services”, the CCG’s director of business planning and partnerships Tim Furness told HSJ. This would be “supported by increasingly integrated health and care commissioning” and further integrating services.

“The change is intended to shift the current focus of community services from crisis intervention and hospital discharges towards earlier prevention and proactive care planning,” he said.

Mr Furness said achieving vanguard status “should be helpful in ensuring that we have the right support to deliver the services and the organisational structures to deliver our… plans”.

“By becoming a vanguard site we propose to develop a model of care that will further integrate health and social care services in the community, pooling the available budget.”

The city’s 87 practices have formed a Sheffield GP Provider Board, which is beginning to take “a more formal collaboration” with other providers.

Sheffield would take a “predominantly multidisciplinary team approach”, Mr Furness explained, with health and social care teams working with GP practices and existing partnerships between secondary care and mental health providers.

He said the Sheffield would initially develop the multispecialty community provider model, described in the forward view.

“This more formal primary/community based organisational form in the first instance will allow us to increase our integration work and test out further opportunities and models in due course,” he said.

However, he suggested would be the “potential to develop integrated patient pathways… within a primary and acute care system model” also outlined in the forward view, in which foundation trusts start delivering GP services with patient lists.

Sheffield’s acute trusts - Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust and Sheffield Children’s Foundation Trust - the community trust Sheffield Health and Social Care Foundation Trust, and Yorkshire Ambulance Service, have are all involved in the bid.

Other organisations involved are Sheffield Cubed, a third sector umbrella organisation for the city, South Yorkshire Housing Association and Voluntary Action Sheffield.