Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership Draft Strategic Plan

People and organisations could take part in the consultation online through the Council’s Consultation Hub, by requesting and completing a paper copy of the consultation documents and questionnaire, or through one of the 75 groups and meetings where the plan was discussed. 

68 responses were received.  48 of these were from groups or organisations and the remaining 20 from individual members of the public.

People were asked to answer several key questions:

1. Are the key priorities the right ones and if not, what should the priorities be?
2. Are the next steps we propose to take in respect of each of the priorities the right ones and if not, what steps should we be taking?
3. Are there any significant issues we have missed and if so, what are they?
4. Does the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment reflect your experience and understanding of the health and social care needs in the City?

People overwhelming agreed with the priorities.  There was particular support for the two priorities, ‘tackling health inequalities’ and ‘prevention and early intervention’.

Priority One Tackling health inequalities – People spoke of the need to work in partnership.  People spoke of the need to identify people affected by inequalities.  People spoke of the needs of particular groups of people. 

Priority Two - Prevention and early intervention – People were concerned that budget pressures would lead to crisis management being prioritised over prevention and early intervention. People spoke about what needed to be focussed on to deliver a preventative approach.

Priority Three - Person centred care.  People said that this is extremely important, and that a good relationship with staff is key to it.  People said that being listened to is important and stated factors which help good person centred working, including IT, technology and staff training. 

Priority Four -Providing the right care in the right place at the right time.  People spoke of the enablers to this, including the need to shift the balance of care, anticipatory care plans, flexible and responsive services and access to good information.  Delayed discharge was seen as a hindrance.

Priority Five - Making the best use of capacity across the system.  People spoke of the crucial role of the Third Sector. People spoke of the need for joint working, particularly around workforce planning and organisational development.

Priority Six - Managing our resources effectively. People were concerned that priorities in the Plan would not be delivered upon in a climate of reducing resources.  People supported using digital services to enhance services/ independence for people who use services and for carers. 

Many respondents named issues which were missing from the Plan.  These included the importance of housing, working well with Children and Families, and being clear on governance issues.  Adult Psychological Services were missing from the Plan. People also said that the Plan did not talk about people from ethnic minorities, lesbian, gay and transgender people, homeless people and hospital care for people with learning disabilities.  

People generally liked the JSNA and said that it would help with future planning and that it was important that it was kept up to date.  People made suggestions for further information to go into it.

As people agreed with the priorities we will keep all of the priorities in the final plan.

Priority One - Tackling health inequalities – We will work with Edinburgh Community planning partnership to address health inequalities across the city.  The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment will help us to better understand health inequalities across the city and will help us to monitor how well our actions are addressing health inequalities.  The move to locality working will mean we can focus on inequalities at a local level.  The Joint Plan recognises the needs of different groups of people.

Priority Two - Prevention and early intervention – we recognise the challenge of focussing on prevention at a time of significant budget pressure.  We will ensure that prevention is embedded through our strategic planning framework.  We will consider all of the suggestions made in the consultation as we develop our more detailed plans.

Priority Three - Person centred working.  We agree that person centred working is vital and will ensure it is a theme running through the final version of the Plan.  We will develop a new strategic planning framework that involves all partners, professionals, services users and communities, in developing services. We will look at developing IT, technology and training to support person centred working. 

Priority Four - Providing the right care in the right place at the right time.  The final version of the plan will set out a number of specific actions that we will take from 2016-2019.  These include gaining a better understanding of capacity, developing locality hubs which bring together staff from different disciplines together to minimise unnecessary hospital admissions and to support discharge, and improving anticipatory care plans

Priority Five - Making the best use of capacity across the system.  We will develop a strategic planning framework that actively involves partners, communities, citizens and staff in the planning and development of services.  We will establish a multi-agency steering group to develop a joined up approach to training across all sectors.  We will identify our requirements for data sharing and how this can be delivered. 

Priority Six - Managing our resources effectively.  The priorities have been developed in recognition of the challenging financial climate.  We will give more detail on this in the final plan.  We recognise the importance of technology/ digital services to support independence.  More detailed proposals will be developed in 2016/17.

We will make sure the identified gaps are filled in the final plan.

We will establish a steering group to make sure the JSNA remains an updated, useful tool to understand Health and Social care needs across the city.