Blog: How the Core20 Ambassadors are making a difference in Derby and Derbyshire
THE NHS has a duty to address health inequality for its patients and the people we serve.
As a Core 20PLUS Ambassador for Derby and Derbyshire, I strive to ensure we are addressing health inequalities.
In my role in the Living Well programme team working for Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust across the integrated care system, I’ve been helping our multi agency Living Well teams to think about addressing health inequalities for our patients.
As part of the Community Mental Health Framework (2019), there was a directive to improve the current care and treatment of people who require support from their community mental health services.
Living Well Derbyshire is a new service which offers short term care for people who need support with their mental health and wellbeing and includes health, social care and voluntary sector organisations to ensure a wide range of multi-agency support.
In my role as Practice Lead for Living Well, I embarked on a project to gather one-page profiles of the health inequalities in each locality and help local teams understand what it means to them.
This type of data is held on SystmOne including a range of indicators such as people’s age, gender, ethnicity, referral postcodes and the reasons why people need support.
I’ve discovered there is a lot of data but that understanding it can be difficult for people in our organisations.
Bringing people together around the right data is crucial to data-driven decision making which will benefit communities and patients.
We have also delivered drop-in sessions and ‘learning labs’ where anyone working in the Living Well teams can come to a reflective space for training and sharing good practice.
As this work continues to progress, we have been able to support teams in identifying community spaces to support wider discussions in addressing health inequalities.
One recent example is our work in better understanding the current barriers to accessing services through the Barrow Hill Memorial Hall Trust project. In this forum we are supporting the project’s ambition in the analysis of Trust data, as well as insight from the local community to look at how we can deliver services differently.
Although this project is in its infancy, we have already seen the benefits of partnership and collaborative working to support improving the care and treatment received within some of our most deprived communities using a place-based approach.
Our next steps are to do some further work in Barrow Hill and understand the potential and look at system-wide data.
We will also continue to support teams in learning labs to identify their priorities and identify champions to take this work forward.
Living Well is transforming services but we need to do it by analysing the data and listening to our communities, to ensure we reduce health inequalities for all.