Agenda item
Housing and the Integrated Care Agenda
The report identifies an opportunity for greater joint/integrated working between the social housing and health care sector and the potential beneficial outcomes this can have for residents.
Lead Officer: Somen Banerjee, Director of Public Health
Tim Madelin, Public Health, LBTH
Minutes:
Somen Banerjee, Director of Public Health presented the report.
Somen explained that the aim of the integrated care is to deliver co-ordinated and person centred care supporting and empowering patients to self-care and self-manage. A short animation was shown to the board meeting demonstrating how joined-up services can help meet the needs of patients and also help reduce anxiety and increase the patients overall health and wellbeing.
He also noted, there is greater emphasis on integrated care increasingly delivered outside traditional health care settings. There are already a number of initiatives such as the Vanguard pilot that will lead to an expansion of the numbers of people subject to integrated care in the borough.
Tower Hamlets Housing Forum (THHF) is the structure in which Registered Providers (RPs) come together in the borough. The group considers health issues and more recently agreed to set up a more formal health and housing sub-group. This will help ensure that smaller RPs are also included and that they all give consistent messages to their residents around health
The commitment from both housing and health is strong with a joint desire to solve problems/issues on behalf of residents/clients. An initial housing and health action plan was developed by THHF and the HWB in February 2014. The action plan featured joint activities aligned to the health and wellbeing strategy’s priorities.
Public Health has a long working relationship with RPs and delivered a number of initiatives in partnership utilising community development approaches to promoting health e.g. Well London initiatives with Poplar HARCA and Tower Hamlets Community Housing
The recent community involvement network meeting (RP staff involved in community involvement) considered barriers, blockages and challenges to closely working between housing and health care sectors:
· Difficulty navigating the health and social care sector to highlight issues and opportunities from an RP perspective
· A need for the opportunities to develop work together around health and housing to be more clearly recognised and prioritised
· Set of challenges in taking forward opportunities relating to
· Employee turnover
· Changing health and social care landscape
· Consistent communication and messaging across agencies
· Ongoing consistent ownership of joint work
· Tracking outcomes of initiatives
The recent community involvement network meeting also considered how the two sectors could work better together and produced the following thoughts;
· RPs are one of the main contact organisations for many residents and there is therefore significant opportunity to provide consistent information and guidance on health and social care issues as well as feedback to service provider
· Some residents do not make as much use of primary care as they could to support their health - there is an opportunity for housing staff to support residents on issues such as GP registration and use of services
· RP websites could be a valuable resource for conveying consistent information on health and healthcare services as well as information for events
· Common tools could be developed to measure the impact of health and housing initiatives could be developed to use across the THHF partnership.
· Greater involvement of RPs on relevant health and social care boards would be helpful to provide the collective leadership to tackle barriers and ensure a realistic pace that is mindful of the need to build relationships at all levels of the organisations.
RESOLVED –
1. That the report be noted;
2. That the comments on potential actions to take these opportunities forward and address barriers be noted.
3. That a further update report is programmed in the forward plan.
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Action: Jamal Uddin, (Strategy, Policy & Performance Officer)
Supporting documents: