Theme 3: Commissioning Care
Boris Johnson said in his first speech as prime minister, in July 2019: “We will fix the crisis in social care once and for all.”
But what is the “crisis”?
The annual State of Care report revealed serious problems with mental health, maternity services and emergency care and Covid has only magnified problems across the health and social care services. Problems with recruiting and retaining sufficient staff, low pay and inadequate training have been relevant discussion topics on the commissioning care agenda for years.
Over the course of the next few week, we, at Coproduce Care, will be conducting a series of online talks, interviews, webinars and interactive engagement activities to discuss these issues and encourage you to critically engage with what “Commissioning Care” really means. Starting Tuesday 1st Dec
Some of the key questions we would like to address are:
· How is care paid for?
· How could the system work better for us or our communities?
· Who should shape care policy?
· How can the real experiences of communities be heard properly in decision-making?
· What alternative systems for delivering care are out there?
· Is social care producing equal outcomes and what are the ways to make it more equal?
The first in our latest #ActforCare theme is: Commissioning the Community
We are joined by Director of Compassionate Communities UK Dr Julian Abel, to explain how tackling isolation is one of the single most effective ways to improve their health and wellbeing.
Julian Abel is Director of Compassionate Communities UK, a charity which aims to share the lessons learnt in both palliative care and primary care more broadly.
In our talk with Julian we will discuss how increased quality social connections and cultivating more compassion is one of the main ways to become a happier, healthier and more empathetic human and how this approach to life can help combat loneliness (a huge issue during this current lockdown!) and what this means in terms of improving our care services.
This event talk will talk place on Tuesday 1/12/20 @5pm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siyuLTIWKWI)
The second talk theme is: Coproducing Commissioning
We are joined by Dr David Hambleton the Clinical Commissioning Group’s Chief Officer to discuss how commission care based on teamwork can be both efficient and effective. We will discuss how trusting local GP practices, councils, and hospitals, to make collective decisions has improved the care providing services in South Tyneside and could be used as a blueprint for other local authorities.
This talk will task place on Wednesday 2/12/20 @ 5pm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14UFKGhavk8)
The final theme for discussion is: Alternative Visions
For this talk we are joined by Brendan Martin, the founder of social enterprise, Public World, and Buurtzorg lead in Britain & Ireland.
The social enterprise Buurtzorg has provided nursing and care in the Netherlands for 12 years, growing from one self-managed team of four nurses to around 1,000 teams and 10,000 nurses today. It currently provides more than half of the district nursing care in the Netherlands – without the need for managers. Buurtzorg means ‘neighbourhood care’ and works by enabling and supporting the professional autonomy of its staff, who in turn focus on supporting clients to live the lives they choose at home for as long as possible. This model emphasises the importance of connecting people with their neighbourhoods and communities, a common theme in much of transformation work in our current system.
We are also joined by the founders of a new Cooperative care provider Equal Care Coop which is the UK's first social care platform co-operative. The Equal Care team are setting out to change the traditional homecare industry, refocusing the power, choice, and control onto the most important people involved: the people receiving the care and the people providing it – be they paid or unpaid, a family member or a professional carer.
This is a real gig economy alternative that pays equal attention to the rights of workers and the rights of those they support. Founder Emma Back said, "We're looking at strawberry patch principles, sociocracy based growth models and federated structures. There are many possibilities for growth that don't entail becoming enormous and monolithic, but where you can still be large enough to offer a real alternative to the private companies taking UK care contracts."
This talk will task place on Monday 7/12/20 @ 5pm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5sumV13NqY)
The discussions will cover the principles that underlie care services in the UK, how, and by who, these services should be funded and ultimately try to answer how IS and how SHOULD care be provided…
And maybe in doing so it will help the PM figure out how to fix the “crisis” in social care.
Feel free to share with anyone who might be interested !!
(Care Workers, Commissioners, Social Workers, People accessing services, Managers...)