Your Healthcare plans social care integration with council

Your Healthcare, which operates in the London borough of Kingston, is also working with the charity Age Concern on the project, which aims to develop integrated health and social care services.

Agenda papers for Kingston Council’s people’s services committee, due to meet on 22 November, say: “Work has commenced… to look closely at how the council and NHS Kingston provide reablement and intermediate care services to help people live at home following an acute hospital admission.

“At the same time some work has taken place to look at the council’s own provision of residential care services, and the balance of residential/nursing home services and home based services across the borough.”

The council intends to devise a two-year plan to cut the amount it spends on care homes and invest in helping people live in their own homes. The first part of that will be a “process of codesign with the council working closely with Your Healthcare and Age Concern”.

This will be supported by a memorandum of understanding between the three parties.

The papers say: “It is anticipated that the first stages of the codesign work will be completed early in the new year and at that stage an update report will be brought to this committee and that as a result fundamental changes to existing service arrangements will follow soon after.”

There will be three areas of focus: development of a “Kingston at Home” plan, securing sufficient short term and long term beds to enable patients to be transferred out of hospital on time; the development of more integrated home care services; and a plan for how those services should be provided.

The plans follow the announcement in late October that the Kingston pathfinder clinical commissioning group were to enter into a partnership with the council to commission services across health and social care.

It is the second partnership scheme to be announced between the council and Your Healthcare in recent weeks, after it was announced that both bodies are to set up a charitable trust with Kingston PCT to run a school.