Carers and carer’s organisations were heavily involved in the development of the strategy which focuses on providing help for people who look after someone who could not do without their help without getting paid.

The scheme will actually get going in October this year after action plans to put the plan into practice have been agreed by the Council Executive and considered by the Overview and Scrutiny Committees concerned at their June meeting.

To read the full report go to www.wandsworth.gov.uk/osc/adultcare. Look at the agenda for April 20, paper number 09-404.

STOP PRESS -URGENT

Wandsworth Adult Social Services wants your views on the plan – go to http://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/Home/CommunityServices/SocialServices/userandcarer.htm
and give your views before 5th May for consideration at Council meetings in June

Your nominations are invited by the NCI (National Centre for Involvement) who want examples of innovative and successful engagement with public and patients submitted by NHS, Voluntary Sector and Social Care organisations. There will be two £5000 awards for each of the winners in the two categories – Commissioning and Provider

You will find further details of submission criteria, rules, guidelines and submission form on the NCI website at www.nhscentreforinvolvement.nhs.uk and clicking into the awards section.

Winners will be announced at the NCI Summer conference in central London on 2nd July this year.

The LINKs Annual Report has to be with the Secretary of State by the end of June and the newsletter offers guidance on how to do this and a template to follow.

Other news gives a link to all the LINk websites that the National Centre for Involvement (NCI) has tracked down so if you want to go comparison shopping and tell us how you think the Wandsworth site compares, look here and let us know.

There are a couple of interesting blogs and forum discussions. Tim Gilling from the Centre for Policy Studies says goodbye and gives his views after 14 months working with the NCI delivering advice and help to nearly 100 LINks. His advice to LINks is to get facing outwards as fast as possible and do not let organisational matters get in the way of getting involved with the community as early as possible. He draws attention to some uncertainty on the future of NCI involvement in the LINks work.

There is a discussion with 37 posts on the need for CRB checks for LINks Steering Group or in the Wandsworth context the Executive Committee – the majority view is that only those doing Entry and View visits need this clearance. To see what Wandsworth LINk has been doing in this area of future work, check out the paper C3 on the agenda for the last Executive meeting on 20th April.

The previous post giving some feedback on a recent PEC meeting with NHS Wandsworth mentioned the new arrangements being set up for what was called ‘provider services’. The point was made that people in Wandsworth would know very little about this development.

So to tell people more about what is meant by ‘provider services’, here is the complete list:

Services

Children and Family Services

• Health Visiting and School Nursing
• Family Planning
• Safeguarding Children Team
• Children’s Therapies (Including those based at QMH)
• Community Audiology
• Haemoglobinopathies
• Homeless and refugee team
• Wandsworth Respite and Parental Support Team (WRAPS)

Adult, Specialist and Diagnostic Services

• Queen Mary’s Hospital Outpatient & Diagnostic Services
• Community Dental Services
• Specialist Rehabilitation Wheelchair services and assisted Technology
• Physiotherapy
• Dietetics (all ages)
• Podiatry
• Minor Injuries Treatment Centre (QMH)
• Walk-in Centre (Tooting)

Older People and Neurological Rehabilitation Services

• Community Nursing (and Community matrons and integrated continence service)
• Falls Service
• Primary Care Therapy Team (St John’s Therapy centre)
• Intermediate care services (in-patient beds, domiciliary care, care co-ordinators and night nursing)
• Community Neurology Therapy team and Case Management
• In patient elderly rehabilitation beds at QMH
• In patient Neurological rehabilitation beds at QMH
• Brysson White Day Unit at QMH
• Wandsworth Integrated Equipment service (WICES)
• In-patient Amputee Rehabilitation at QMH
• Specialist Respiratory Nursing Service and cardiac rehabilitation service
• Specialist Heart Failure Nursing Service
• Specialist Leg Ulcer Nursing Service
• Specialist Diabetes Nursing Service
• Specialist HIV Nursing Service
• Operational Management of community estate

Human Resources

• Training & Development
• Organisational Development (OD)
• Recruitment
• Employee Relations
• Workforce planning and Information
• Occupational Health
• Improving Working Lives and Childcare

Professional Leadership

• Nursing and Therapy strategy development and implementation (including Practice Nurses & PLD services).
• Modernisation of nursing and therapy roles
• Practice based competency development
• Advancement of practice including non medical prescribing
• Commissioning and providing bespoke training
• Clinical recruitment and retention strategies
• Clinical supervision leadership
• Co-ordination of clinical placements and infrastructure requirements
• Maintaining and developing interface between external and internal professional networks
• Core clinical policy and procedure development
• Leadership for Non Medical Prescribing and medicine administration safe practice
• Sponsorship and secondment of clinicians e.g. specialist practice

Quality, Safety and Assurance

• Clinical Governance
• Risk Management
• Health and Safety
• Complaints
• Litigation
• Conciliation
• Infection Control

Contracts Management

• Service Level Agreements performance & developments.
• Negotiation of contracts.
• Production of the Provider Services Service Agreement proposals setting out services offered.

Research, Development and Innovation

• Strategic development for research
• Research and development support functions for PCT staff and practitioners
• Research training
• Recruitment of patients to clinical trials and support for external studies
• Research governance
• Intellectual property and innovation
• Financial management of research
• Liaison and partnership working with clinical research networks

IT

• Strategic development and operation of ICT services.
• Local rollout of NHS Connecting for Health (CfH), (formerly known as NPfIT) and local ICT programmes.
• Responsible for ICT services for the integrated community hospital at Queen Mary’s Hospital.
• Standardisation and upgrade of ICT facilities for 53 local GP practices, Wandsworth Prison and 17 health clinics.
• ICT technical and support management services
• ICT training and development.
• Web application design and technical architecture development.

Information Governance

• PCT Information Governance strategy leadership and assurances
• PCT Information Risk management support functions for staff and practitioners
• Data Protection and Privacy leadership and support
• PCT Independent contractors Information Governance support and facilitation
• Information Governance training and development
• Data handling incident management
• Corporate and Health Care Records Management

The NHS calls departments that do things like community nursing or supply of equipment for disabled people ‘provider services’. At the moment there are over 30 services currently provided by people directly employed by NHS Wandsworth (the old PCT). Government policy means that from the 1^st of April they all have to be separated in an “autonomous provider organisation” and this is a stage to them becoming one – or a number – of independent organisations which will have to compete for the commissioners’ business.

There will be an engagement exercise about what form this should take over the summer. Andrew Craig in his role as the lay member on the PEC made the point that people in Wandsworth mostly know little or nothing about this big change which could have a big impact on the services – their extent and quality. It is essential therefore that whatever solution is adopted for what is being called the “externalisation” of provider services, individual patients still get the services they expect and need.

Other important issues discussed at the meeting were the new Cancer Prevention Plan and the consultation (finishing on 8th May) on services for Stroke and Major Trauma. Strokes by the way happen mainly in the London suburbs with the major traumas -stabbing, shooting – in the centre of town.

Take a look at Andrew’s feedback here: PEC Lay Member Feedback Report March 2009 (opens in Adobe PDF). All of Andrew’s PEC reports are found under the Resources – Health & Social Care menu.

We thought it would help LINk members to understand the health and social care agenda of the PCT if we made available the annotated agenda for NHS Wandsworth Board meetings produced by Andrew Craig as part of his role as the lay member of the Professional Executive Committe.  Andrew gives his own views in a commentary on the issues the Board is going to discuss so helping outsiders understand more about what is being proposed. This is generally available the day before the Board meets and we will do our best to let you know they are available as soon as we get the news ourselves.The latest example is for the meeting held at the beginning of April.

Papers for the Board meetings are available on the PCT website.  The PCT Board meets approximately every two months. You can also get to the PCT website by going to the  Resources Helpful Websites section of our  LINk site under Health and Social Care  Statutory.

Download:
PCT Board Annotated Agenda 28th Jan 2009
PCT Board Annotated Agenda 1st Apr 2009

These documents are also available via the Health and Social care page.

All the sub-groups are reporting back this month and there are four papers on the issues that the LINk is considering as well as a financial report. Plenty to think about and discuss on this 13 item agenda.

Paper C1 and the accompanying Appendix looks again at what the priorities LINks should adopt in the months ahead. 29 suggestions are listed in the table in the Appendix and all have been scored – the higher the score the higher the priority.

One of the jobs that LINks have to do is ‘entering and viewing’ premises where health and social care services are delivered. The Executive have discussed this before and the latest paper on the topic sets out how to put this responsibility into action. LINk members will have a chance to put their names forward to do this job and many members have already told us on their membership application forms that they are interested.

Money is discussed in two papers – one on what the best approach is to paying and rewarding people who do things for the LINk and the other paper for information is a financial statement for the first year of Wandsworth LINk.

Click here to visit the LINk Meeting Minutes page to view April’s meeting notes and documents.

Meeting details

Monday 20^th April 2009, 6.00-8.30pm at

Earlsfield Library

276 Magdalen Road, London, SW18 3NY

The latest newsletter from the NCI (National Centre for Involvement) announces that LINks Guides 16 and 17 are now available. Number 16 is about community development and how LINks can contribute to community development around health and well-being. Guide 17 tackles ‘LINks and Overview and Scrutiny Committees working together’. It offers advice to help LINk and these important council committees understand their ‘respective and distinct roles’ and suggests ways of joint working for a full contribution to public accountability. Others in the series cover setting up work programmes and preparing annual reports.

Other news:

• the NCI Summer Conference is in London on 2nd July
• the 2009 Annual Survey on the state of Public and Private Involvement will be going out in April – if you want to have your say and do not get a questionnaire, tell survey unit at NCI in an email

If you are reading this and you are not registered with Centre but would like to be to get your own copy of the newsletter, you have to register on their website or call Gill on 02476 150645.  If you have any questions, please email nci@warwick.ac.uk.

LINk members are invited to join the group responsible for supporting the LINk to engage service users, carers, patients and the public. We need members with a range of different skills such as people who:

• are experts by their experience of health and care services
• have links with BME networks and understand how best to ensure that their voices are heard on health and care issues
• are willing to undertake networking visits to talk with service users and/or patients at the grass roots and feed their views back
• might be interested to help with the newsletter and other publicity materials either writing or helping with design and lay out
• might be interested to be involved in and/or monitor the consultation process of the local NHS or Adult Services

Expenses and transport costs will be reimbursed. If you are interested in participating please get in touch with us via the contact details below.

You can see more details about what the group wants to do and how often it will meet on the website or a copy can be requested by contacting Simonne on 020 8696 1709 or by email simonne@wandsworthlink.org.uk

You can now see what happened at the first meeting of the new Executive Committee on 16th February this year. There were important papers on setting the priorities of the LINk in the coming months. The minutes can be seen at on the meeting page for the 16th February.