Council and democracy

Agenda item

Adult's Integrated Care Strategy

Minutes:

Ceri Armstrong introduced the “Better Care Together Thurrock - The Case for Further Change – Thurrock’s new adults’ Integrated Care Strategy” to members. The Better Care Together Thurrock - The Case for Further Change had set out the ambitious and detailed plans for transforming Thurrock’s health, care, housing and wellbeing services and provided a blue-print for service integration to form one place-based and integrated care system, designed to deliver better outcomes for individuals that would take place close to home and make the best use of health and care resources.

 

The following PowerPoint was presented to Members:

 

(Public Pack)Item 8 - The Case for Future Change Presentation Agenda Supplement for Health and Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee, 07/06/2022 19:00 (thurrock.gov.uk)

 

Councillor Piccolo thanked Ceri Armstrong and Les Billingham and welcomed the report which had thoroughly proven that we understood what worked well.

 

Councillor Piccolo questioned whether the changes would jeopardise the effectiveness of the services and how this would affect the number of staff to which Ceri Armstrong stated there would not be any difference in the number of staff just that they would be working in a very different way. Moving services to a position where they would work together could reduce the number of times people would have to be assessed. There would be additional resources in terms of numbers as capacity would be freed up by reducing some of the work that would get in the way of the right action being taken. There would be the opportunity to learn from one another, have a more diverse knowledge of what was going on rather than being specialised in one particular area.

 

Councillor Fish stated the report had emphasised on the word “learning” a lot and had concerns on how that learning might take place. Ceri Armstrong stated that learning was used in a sense on how to empower staff to think about doing things differently and for members of staff who worked across different thresholds and functions to get together to look at cases differently. Les Billingham commented that the council were currently looking at using a technique called Human Learning Systems to help with this. The word learning had been mentioned a lot in the report deliberately as the aim was for a learning culture but in terms of how this would be done would definitely not be designed to be bureaucratic.

 

Councillor Polley referred to the primary care population lead area and questioned what the data was based on, how up to date this data was and how would this be updated with the expansion of growth in the borough. Councillor Polley stated this would be amazing when delivered but relied on all those partnerships involved working together and some learnings had to come out of that.

 

Councillor Pothecary thanked officers for the detailed, well researched and ambitious report and asked for clarification on Thurrock Integrated Care Alliance (TICA) and the accountability structures that ran alongside that. Ceri Armstrong stated this was the integrated health partnership that sat across the transformation programme of all services. TICA would have the same responsibilities as that of officers and made decisions in an integrated manner. In terms of accountability to committees would continue to scrutinise and be called to overview and scrutiny committees, health and wellbeing board and cabinet. Les Billingham stated these were a condition of the new health landscape with each place having some form of partnership agreement that would consist of local health providers.

 

Councillor Sammons thanked officers for the very good report.

 

Councillor Snell agreed this was a good report however had concerns over how these services would be measured and with the plan there were a lot of parts that could cause a lot of problems. Ceri Armstrong stated there would be parameters around learnings, decision makings and working within frameworks. To also look at what changes to services would need to be made to deliver a better response for residents and to keep people safe.

 

Councillor Piccolo thanked Ceri Armstrong and Les Billingham for the good report.

 

RESOLVED

 

The Health and Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee endorsed the Better Care Together Thurrock - The Case for Further Change – Thurrock’s new adults’ Integrated Care Strategy.

 

Ceri Armstrong and Les Billingham left the meeting at 8.49pm.

Supporting documents: