Edinburgh health chiefs to ‘set aside’ £2 million for social care push

The Capital's health and social care partnership want to push ahead with a transformational plan that will include 'community-based crisis management.'

The Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership’s transformational programme will focus on three strands – well-being and prevention, community and hospital-based crisis management and supporting people to live at home and in bed-based care.

The partnership has struggled to meet targets in areas of “underperformance” including delayed discharge, people waiting for care, assessment and review – but improvements have been made. But the service faces being required to make around £29m of cuts in next year’s budget, despite needing to overhaul how services are delivered due to the Capital’s growing, ageing population.

Judith Proctor, chief officer of the partnership, said: “It represents the next iteration of the IJB’s strategic change ambitions. Edinburgh is large and complex. We are doing a lot of things well and we want to create a very structured approach of how we deliver that work.

“We well know some of the financial challenges that face us but we also recognise that in order to achieve change of this scale, we will need to have capacity across our system in support of that complex change.”

In her report to the board, Ms Proctor called for “thinking and acting in radically different ways” in order to “reshape a health and care system fit for a sustainable future”. The IJB acknowledged some investment was required to bring about a serious culture change.

She added: “By working together and collectively we would be able to create new and sustainable services which keep people independent and well for as long as possible and, where services are needed, they are delivered at or as close to home as possible and are sustainable within a reducing public finance envelope.”

The strategy aims to “reduce dependency on the health and care institutions and focus the resources with the system to those who most need them” and “working with people at the earliest possible point”.

Vice-chairwoman Carolyn Hirst said it was “absolutely crucial” for the IJB to press ahead with the ‘Edinburgh model’ of transformation.

She added: “I don’t think we can under-estimate the challenges for our statutory partners – this different way of working. We will be working with people rather than doing things to people.

“It’s a fundamentally different way of approaching how we work – it genuinely is transformational. I think we have to take this seriously and I think we have to embrace this.”

Chief financial officer of the IJB, Moira Pringle told the board that the £2m to be set aside in the reserves was “our best estimate” as to additional funding that was required and would likely be provided “over a two or three-year period”.

Conservative Cllr Susan Webber called for more urgency in using technology more effectively.

Ms Proctor said that technology would be pivotal to the transformation strategy.

She said: “There’s so much potential around the use of technology that we have not embraced – I don’t think we will have that fully achieved by 2020.

“What I would want us to have is a clear vision as a health and social care partnership about where we will be applying technology and support for people and for our teams and for our staff. We are looking for a really clear plan on how we embed digital technology across everything that we do.”