Personalised care

The widely accepted definition of personalised care is that people have choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered, based on what matters to them and their individual strengths and needs.

Personalised care recognises that there are two experts in the room - the practitioner with their knowledge and skills as a health care professional, and the person who is an expert in their own life and understands what is important to them. For this to happen we need a new kind of relationship between people, professionals, and the health and care system. One where people have more of a voice, and are involved in the decisions that are being made about them.

At the heart of personalised care is a better conversation. A better conversation is more than a transactional exchange of information – it can transform relationships and health behaviours to benefit our population, our workforce and the wider system.

Across Lancashire and South Cumbria there is evidence of great work in place already supporting personalised care, and this has been reflected in our region being chosen by NHS England as a personalised care demonstrator site (opens in new window). We want to develop this work further, learning from what is working well and creating partnerships within our health and care system, our local populations, and communities to ensure all our residents are receiving personalised care.

Let's Get Personal

As part of creating a personalised care approach across our communities and our workforce, a co-production group, known as Let’s Get Personal, was created. The group is an enabler for personalised care, for collectively raising the voices of people with lived experience to influence and shape how services are designed, delivered and experienced.

Let’s Get Personal is a group of volunteers, who live in and around the Lancashire and South Cumbria area, who are both passionate and committed about using their own personal insights and experiences of using the health and care system, to improve how services are shaped, improved and experienced by others.

Taking control of their own health and care has been a personal journey for each person in the group and they’ve been using these experiences constructively to share and effect positive change within the health and care system. You can watch the videos they've shared about those experiences in our Personalised Care playlist (opens in new window). Don't forget to select 'Personalised Care' from the dropdown list.

It’s still early days for the group, but with three of them now sitting on national forums for NHS service improvement, and others enthusiastically engaging at a local level in a variety of campaigns and conversations, their voices are beginning to have influence in helping to raise awareness of co-production, co-design and the real need for people to be at the heart in health and social care of decisions that affect them.

Some members of the group are graduates of the NHS Peer Leadership programme and have come together to share their experiences for the purpose of improving health and social care for others. As a group they would like to connect with other people with lived experience, to spread the word of co-production across Lancashire and South Cumbria and have an even greater influence on how services are shaped and delivered.

The ambition is for a diverse network of co-production groups from across all our localities, all working on their own specific areas of expertise, but who can come together as a collective voice for influence.

So far, the group has been actively participating in:

• telling their personal stories
• creating videos with key messages about their experience of the health care system
• supporting others to navigate health and care systems
• participating in virtual coffee mornings with the Lancashire Recovery College
• contributing to national policy updates
• contributing to local campaigns such as Self Care Week
• developing top tips for people to use in order to make the most of GP and hospital appointments

The group is supported by a facilitator from Lancashire County Council (Diana Hollingworth) and through the Personalised Care programme’s Fred Attwater and the Personalised Care Hub’s Ali Green. Contact the team by email.

Personalised Care videos

Listen to two of the leaders from across Lancashire and South Cumbria talk about what personalised care means to them below.

You can watch all of our videos in the 'Personalised Care playlist', including ones from our Let's Get Personal Group about their own experiences.