Surrey Heartlands Health and Care Partnership has launched an innovative new ‘united people’ strategy, aiming to tackle issues currently faced by the health and social care sector.
It comes as part of Surrey Heartlands’ vision to reduce high demand for services and waiting times, and to increase its focus on population health and poor preventative health.
The ICS said: “We need to do something different if we are to achieve our ambitious vision and increase our focus on population health and ill health prevention, as well as providing high quality, sustainable services. The recent Fuller Stocktake has also called for new integrated neighbourhood teams to provide more holistic care for the most vulnerable members of our communities.”
Now a new co-designed strategy ‘United Surrey Talent’ has been released, with an aim to integrate existing health and care workers to better serve its local community.
Speaking on the strategy ICS chief people and digital officer, Michael Pantlin, said: “I am delighted that so many organisations have pulled together on this and want to make changes for today as well as tomorrow.”
The approach noted six key focuses over the coming years:
- To modernise and integrate recruitment – for example, sharing candidates between partners to ensure the right job is matched to the right person and preventing good talent from having to “shop around”
- Building new capabilities – such as a new Health & Social Care Academy for learning and education across our 40,000 staff and students in our local colleges and higher education
- Developing fulfilling careers – for example upskilling and supporting care workers to deliver more health care and offering sometimes two jobs instead of one – the first job and a guarantee of advancement once standards have been achieved.
- Establishing a ‘Surrey offer’ – this will entail levelling up staff experience, such as ensuring everyone can raise concerns with an independent advisor if they are worried and addressing parity of terms and conditions between similar roles in different teams. We must also find ways of helping more staff with affordable accommodation.
- To ‘enable’ the United Surrey Team – supporting a one-team approach by helping staff move easily between organisations, building our new neighbourhood teams and supporting staff with continuous digital advancement.
- Building our expertise – This will include sharing our expertise, resources and systems to ensure all organisations can benefit from this new approach.
The partnership has acknowledged that some improvements are needed as it continues to work on its strategy, but some of its pioneer projects have already been implemented. For example, in East Surrey the Home first Initiative was launched with the help of an integrated enhanced care team, to help its patients go home sooner during the winter.
In Guildford and Waverley, candidate sharing has already begun and in primary care, the development of a reservist pool will hopefully begin to help with general practice.
Michael continued and said: “There is a win-win on offer here to help ensure more people can be better cared for and more quickly, in the right setting for them, whilst simultaneously providing more job satisfaction and access to employment and advancement.”
