Partnership Working and Integration

As part of our service strategy we are responding to national policy and local priorities. A number of these priorities will lead to significant service developments for both adult and children’s services and fundamental changes in care across Leeds. This will in turn affect the interface with hospitals in the city, the provision of intermediate care, and the delivery of services in people’s homes and communities.

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Our partners

Our aim, to provide the best possible care in every community, requires that we work closely with our partners in health, social care and other organisations.  Leaders from organisations across the city, including Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, the three Clinical Commissioning Groups in Leeds and Leeds City Council, have been working hard to make this happen and one example of this close working has resulted in Leeds being awarded pioneer status by the Department of Health in recognition of the national lead role in modelling integrated health and social care.

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Our focus

As part of a health and social care transformation programme we are working with our partners to develop integrated adult health and social care teams for the care of older people and those with long term conditions, focusing on:

• The needs of frail older people with complex health and social care needs which could help achieve the biggest impact in terms of quality of patient experience and cost efficiency through process redesign, eradication of duplication and overlap.
• Incorporating the needs of adults of all ages with a broad range of long term conditions increasing the opportunities for savings across the system.
• Building on the work undertaken by the trust to establish twelve neighbourhood district nursing teams focused around groups of GP practice population to bring in a full range of health and social care services, building responsive services around populations in neighbourhoods, eradicating duplication, waste and unnecessary overlap.

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Our aims

We have plans to further develop and review the services integrated to date as well as seeking other opportunities for integration that mean a more seamless and patient centered approach to delivering care. We aim to:

• Integrate the trust’s Intermediate Care Team and Leeds Adult Social Care’s Reablement service to ensure better outcomes for the people of Leeds and improve resource availability. The overall service would be worth in the region of £11m, with £3m from council resources.
• Review children’s services and to devise a new Health Visiting service model and review of Children Centre services leading us to become an Early Implementation Site of the Health Visiting Call to Action programme.
• Continue to deliver a jointly-commissioned Early Start Service which has brought Health Visitors and Children Centre staff together to provide an integrated service offer for 0 - 5 year olds that supports all children and their families to have the best possible start in life.