Agenda item

The Director of Adult Social Care and Safeguarding submits a report that provides the Adult Social Care Scrutiny Commission with an update on the progress of the Leicester City Better Care Fund (BCF), highlighting those schemes that relate directly to Adult Social Care.

The commission is recommended to note the progress made and the positive impacts achieved.

The Director of Adult Social Care and Safeguarding submitted a report that provided an update on the progress of the Leicester City Better Care Fund (BCF).

Members considered the report and various comments and questions were raised, including the following:

BCF 5: The Unscheduled Care Team. The report stated that the Integrated Crisis Response Team (ICRS) had seen 429 patients in June, with 141 of these being fallers.  A comment was raised that the report did not include an age profile of those who had fallen.

The Director responded that the number was predominately made up of older, frail people.  Preventative work was carried out and through this, people could be given appropriate equipment and the Handy Person Service could make adjustments at their homes to ensure that any factors that contributed to the patient’s fall would be addressed.

BCF 10: Mental Health Discharge Team. A question was raised as to the factors that were causing delays in the discharge of patients with mental health issues.

The Director responded that delays could be due to trying to find suitable housing accommodation. Very complicated arrangements were required to ensure that people were safe and carefully managed in the community.  Considerable progress on addressing the delays had been made but there was a need to make sure that appropriate resources were available before people were discharged.

A member referred to para 2.4 of the report which stated that performance against the nationally prescribed indicators was positive for all indicators except the emergency admission indicator. He congratulated officers for the overall positive performance but questioned whether steps could be taken to improve the emergency admission indicator.

The Director responded that Leicester was beginning to buck the trend in the level of emergency admissions by introducing a number of strategies. For example:

1)    Once a 999 call was received; a nurse practitioner might be sent to the patient in their home to ascertain whether they could safely remain there if appropriate resources were provided to assist. 

2)      Before a patient was formally admitted into hospital, a crisis team based there might decide that a patient, with the provision of an appropriate level of assistance, might be better remaining in their own home, thus avoiding admission.

Philip Parkinson thanked the Director for the report and suggested that it would be useful to include details of such initiatives in any future reports. The Deputy City Mayor responded that by working with partners such as Healthwatch, members of the public could be made aware of the options and services that were available to prevent admission.

A query was raised in relation to emergency admissions, as to the measures that were being taken to educate the public and to change people’s attitudes to calling 999. The Deputy City Mayor responded that the local authority worked very closely with NHS partners, but he believed that the NHS needed to do more to communicate options. The Director added that even where people called 999, the non-emergency cases could be identified and people helped via a different strategy.

BCF 8: I.T. Integration. Members queried the current situation with the ‘NHS Number’. The Director explained that that there was a requirement in the BCF for partners to use the ‘NHS Number’. There was now a single identifier for each individual which would enable the sharing of information and data across the different services. 

Members thanked the Director for the report and requested that a further paper reporting on progress made, be brought back to the commission in six months’ time

RESOLVED:

that a further report on progress in the Better Care Fund be brought back to the commission in six months’ time.