Staying in Control - Health

Staying In Control is a learning community of 23 second phase members from Health and local authorities, who are exploring how personalisation models developed in social care can best be amended and tested within the NHS.

Our Health work: “Staying in Control” began early in 2008, predating Lord Darzi’s health report, “High Quality Care for All”, published in the summer of 2008  which then made the idea of piloting personal health budgets the legitimate ‘business’ of the NHS.  Our initial work together produced the first discussion paper on Self-Directed Support in Health: “Citizenship in Health”.  It is important that we now test out in practice how Self-Directed Support in Health can work best for people directly affected, professionals and communities.  

In Control’s second phase of work focusing on how self directed support can work best in Health currently has 23 members who will be working collaboratively throughout 2010. Our work will complement the Department of Health’s personal health budget pilot research, and will be distinctive through keeping a particular emphasis on six key issues:

1. The purpose of self directed support  being to enable citizenship, and people having the best quality life they can.            
 Our aim is to improve the quality of:-

• The conversation between people and health professionals,
• Decision making and support/treatment planning and  Health outcomes; - through shifting power and decision making closer to the person directly effected.

2. Our focus is on the whole person in their whole social context and aimed at enhancing “real wealth”, working with people’s strengths and skills as well as the needs they see as most important to them and which are most important for them.

3. Our programme will work with individuals and family members alongside professionals, to put in place sustainable co-production and peer support, locally, regionally and nationally.

4. Our work will aim to act on ways to make the context within which people are seeking to establish self directed support conducive to the process- for example by working with a community focus as well as a creative service delivery focus; and through working to create tools to support providers and commissioners to shift power and control closer to people.

5. We will learn through doing; and evaluate developments through gathering the views of individuals, family members and professionals.
 
6. In Control’s overall message looking forward is our determination to support people being seen as whole people; with perhaps a range of complex interacting needs but also, crucially, with a potential to contribute and creatively engage in change, in ways which amaze and confound our traditional patterns of relating.

Our Health members are:

1.    Lincolnshire                          
2.    Stoke on Trent                      
3.    Norfolk           
4.    Nottingham City        
5.    Hull                             
6.    Stockton on tees      
7.    Hartlepool                  
8.    Eastern and Coastal Kent
9.    Nottinghamshire      
10.  Redcar and Cleveland        
11.  South West Essex PCT      
12.  Northumberland                   
13.  Shropshire                            
14.  Blackburn with Darwen  
15.  Central and Eastern Cheshire
16.  Halton and St Helen’s
17.  Warrington
18.  Western Cheshire
19.  Cumbria
20.  Ashton, Leigh and Wigan and
21.  North West Strategic Health Authority
22.  Bassetlaw PCT
23. NHS Northamptonshire

Many of our Health members are also working jointly with their partner Local Authorities, and are beginning to develop partnership with local individuals and family members, and with local Provider organisations.