The Toolkit is designed to help you plan your engagement activities, please click here to download it
Public Engagement
Current opportunities to be involved
Where would you like to be cared for?
Have your say on the future of community-based adult healthcare services in South Lakeland
Update: Thank you to everyone who took the time to have their say through this consultation.
As a result of the feedback we received, the Morecambe Bay CCG Governing Body has, at its meeting on February 15 2022, approved a recommendation to reinvest the cost of running the Langdale Unit at Westmorland General Hospital into delivering more care in the community.
You can find out more about the consultation in the Report of Findings linked below and this press release.
Work is now underway to shape more details around the new model of care. If you would like to get involved, please contact us at: engagement.morecambebayccg@nhs.net
Background: Morecambe Bay Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), together with its partners, is proposing changes to the way care is provided for people in South Lakeland who need more support than can currently be provided by GPs or District Nurses but don’t need to stay on an acute hospital ward. For example, after a fall, when recovering after surgery, or at the end of their lives.
In South Lakeland, 28 community beds on the Langdale Unit at Westmorland General Hospital have been caring for adults who needed this kind of care since 2008. But feedback from healthcare professionals, patients and experts in caring for older people shows that hospital isn’t always the right place for patients to recover.
The CCG is therefore proposing to reinvest the £3m per year cost of running the Langdale Unit into recruiting 36 additional nurses, physios and occupational therapists in the community. This would mean more community nursing staff and rapid response and frailty services to enable older people to remain close to their homes and communities and avoid unnecessary hospital admissions. The proposals also include commissioning care homes and some community accommodation for people if home isn’t the right place for them to rehabilitate.
The CCG invited local people and organisations to have their say on four potential models of delivering care. The public consultation ran until Friday 31 December 2021.
Engagement Toolkit
Bay Health and Care Partners (BHCP) wants to make a success of engagement and has worked with The Consultation Institute to develop this guide to help us plan your BHCP engagement to help you meet your delivery plan requirements. The BHCP approach focuses on using patient, public and stakeholder engagement to improve and co-produce health services which improve health outcomes.
Bay Health and Care Partners’ delivery plans should be built on engagement, improving the way we involve people, seeking their views on proposals, or involving them as partners in the decision-making process. As users of our services, people often have great ideas about how to improve those services. When engaging others about our service area or any other issue you may need to focus on finding out about their:
1. Needs
2. Concerns
3. Priorities
4. Satisfaction levels
5. Opinions on proposed service
re-design/development
Good engagement is a genuine two-way process which gives people an opportunity to influence decisions. We are all different with our own needs and views, so we need to understand each other, understand our stakeholders and respond to them.
Morecambe Bay Citizens' Assembly
The Morecambe Bay Citizens' Assembly is an opportunity for staff and members of the public to help shape local health and care services. The assembly came as a result of a BCT (Better Care Together) 2.0 launch event in February 2019, where a gap was identified in public engagement. To tackle this issue we launched the Morecambe Bay Citizens' Assembly in June 2019, so far approximately 350 people have signed up. The assembly is open to everyone, whether you are a patient, a member of staff or just live locally.
You can sign up here - registering takes five minutes.
Members will have a voice on how changes to local health and care services are delivered.
Shaping our plans
Bay Health and Care Partners (the Partners) - made up of local GPs, hospitals, as well as doctors, nurses and community social care - have been working together since 2014 to deliver a plan, Better Care Together (opens in a new window), to improve health and social care services across the area.
Developing our plan for the next 5 years
We are developing a five-year plan for health and social care in Morecambe Bay. Your feedback has helped us to clearly understand our priorities for the next five years and make sure we are targeting the things that are most important to you, your family and your community.
Our first step in preparing our plan was to listen to people’s views and to share our challenges and the priorities we intend to work towards. We invited the public, patients and the wider civic community of Morecambe Bay to give their views on the effectiveness of our priorities to meet the challenges ahead.
We asked for views on our next steps for the local long-term future for health and social care services in the Morecambe Bay area. This also links to the long-term plan for the NHS which has set national priorities and the regional plans for the whole of Lancashire and South Cumbria.
Engagement outcome
Thank you to everyone who shared their views and ideas about our new strategy. Please download the file below to view the outcomes of our public engagement.
When will your strategy be final and will it be shared?
Our strategy will be developed in the autumn and shared in November 2019. It will be published on our website and shared widely with our partners across the Morecambe Bay area. If you would like to be kept informed, please let us know by getting in touch.
'Where would you like to be cared for?'
Between September and December 2019, Bay Health and Care Partners wanted to seek feedback about how Step-Up and Step-Down beds are used in Morecambe Bay, focusing particularly in South Lakes and Furness. An engagement paper and surveys for both patients and NHS staff asked “Where would you like to be cared for?”.
The engagement paper explained what “Step-Up” and “Step-Down” care within South Cumbria is and gave some background about how this care is provided.
Members of staff and the public were encouraged to provide give thier views and ideas through a survey that was available online or as a paper copy. This gave people chance to tell us about how and where our patients would be best cared for now and in the future and gained feedback about the care models described in the engagement document.
The report of findings from this engagement shows the findings of the survey and also highlights the ideas from the 215 responses from members of the public and 49 responses from staff working locally.
Since 2014, Better Care Together has:
- Become part of the national Atrial Fibrillation programme: we are identifying patients on GP registers who are at risk of a stroke and would benefit from anti-coagulation medication. This will reduce strokes and prevent unnecessary hospital admissions
- Developed nine Integrated Care Communities (ICCs) around the Bay. These ICCs are integrating primary and community care (such as district nurses, social workers and physios) closer to home, particularly working with patients with complex needs and reducing the need for hospital admissions
- Set out a population health framework and strategy and working with partners on a clear set of initiatives for the next 5 years
- Developed a new frailty pathway to help to identify older people who may need earlier support (both health and social care) to maintain their independence in their own home.
Page last updated: 15:25, 02/03/2022