Health & Social Care

This service, located at Voluntary Action Charnwood, covering Charnwood and North West Leicestershire aims to widen and improve the involvement of voluntary organisations, community groups and self-help groups in healthcare planning.
The important contribution these organisations can make to improving health and Well-being, reducing health inequalities and helping to build quality services, is well recognised and the role of this project is to assist the voluntary and community sector in sharing this knowledge with both health and social care providers.
Representatives of groups, if appropriate, will be encouraged to be more involved with healthcare planning, through methods such as consultations and health forums.
To contact the Health and Social Care Involvement Worker, Sallianne Bishop, please contact her direct on 01509 631785 or via email: sallianne.bishop@voluntaryactioncharnwood.org.uk

Practice Based Commissioning

The Department of Health (DoH) required that all GP practices were involved with Practice Based Commissioning (PBC) by December 2006.
PBC involves GP’s being allocated their own ‘ring fenced’ budgets to commission their own services for their patients. There are some services however that will not be included in the PBC budget (such as East Midlands Ambulance Services or more specialist services).

The Primary Care Trust for Leicestershire and Rutland allocate the budgets to surgeries, and a specific area of interest is encouraging GP’s to develop care pathways for patients that involve providing care closer to home.
For more information on Practice Based Commissioning, and the impact this could have on local services, please contact Sallianne Bishop.

Voluntary Sector Involvement in Healthcare Planning and Delivery

Health and Well-being is something that most services are now recognising and planning for in their delivery, especially Healthcare providers. However what makes the Voluntary Sector stand out is the fact that we have been providing a Well-being approach to our services for a considerable length of time.
One of the key benefits of the Voluntary and Community Sector is the diversity it can offer. It tends to work in a more holistic way than statutory services, however still manages to provide quality and dependability above all else.
With this in mind the Voluntary Action Centres for Charnwood and North West Leicestershire embarked on research to establish feeling amongst the sector to ascertain what needed to be done in order to encourage more statutory services (especially GP’s) to use our services.
Following a consultation event and one to one interviews the decision was taken to develop a ‘portfolio’ of VCS services. It was envisaged that the portfolio would be an ‘IT’ resource that GP’s in particular could use when treating patients to ensure that the root cause of the presenting symptoms was treated in addition to using traditional medical methods.

Where are we at now?

After several months of work the portfolio project has been adopted by the Primary Care Trust for Leicestershire and Rutland, to run as a 6-month pilot, and has also received funding in order to cover costs.

The portfolio will represent the VCS in North West Leicestershire, and 3 GP’s surgeries in the locality will take part on the pilot by using this portfolio when treating patients.
Using this approach ensures we will be working toward treating the ‘whole’ person holistically with support and advice from responsible organisations, as well as treating with a medical model.

We are working closely with the Primary Care Trust, the Improvement Foundation (IF), the VCO’s in the locality and the GP’s involved. All of our findings will be analysed carefully and the intention is to role the programme out across the County after a successful 6-month pilot.

The next stage of our work will be to develop the portfolio, provide training to the VCO’s, and ensure that the pilot starts early in 2008. During the six months Sallianne will be the link worker between all parties involved to ensure the pilot runs as smoothly as possible. Analysis will take place of our findings after the 6-month period with this influencing and working toward a Countywide roll out.

The key outcomes we hope to see are:

• improved relationships between the VCO and health providers
• to increase awareness of modern day VCO services
• new working initiatives (perhaps commissioning from GPs of VCO services)
• patients receiving holistic treatment that impacts positively on their Well-being
• reduction in repeat visits of patients to GP’s for non-medical treatment and an increased uptake instead to VCO services.

For further information, please contact Sallianne on 01509 631785 Sallianne.bishop@voluntaryactioncharnwood.org.uk

CoDa Loughborough

There is a group in Loughborough that is establishing under the umbrella of the National organisation CoDa UK (Co-Dependents Anonymous).

Co-Dependents Anonymous (CoDA) is a set of informal self-help groups made up of men and women with a common interest in working through the problems that co-dependency has caused in their lives. CoDA is based on AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and uses an adapted version of their Twelve Steps and Traditions as a central part of its suggested programme of recovery.

To attend CoDA meetings, all you need is the willingness to work at having healthy relationships. This means that all kinds of people attend meetings. Individual members can and do have differing political, religious and other affiliations, but since these are not relevant to the business of recovery from co-dependency, no comment is made about them.
If you are interested in taking part in the development of this group please contact the developer of this group via Sallianne Bishop on 01509 631785.