Health and Social Care

Spotlight on: Keith Redpath, Chief Officer for West Dunbartonshire

October 27, 2014 by Linda White No Comments | Category Spotlight

Here in West Dunbartonshire we are in the fortunate position of already being in a fully integrated Community Health & Care Partnership. Our CHCP has been in operation since 2010 and brings together the full range of community health and social work/care services for all client groups under a single management structure and oversight.

In terms of the new legislation, our existing arrangement is well beyond the required minimum scope of the new Partnerships and we are moving to the new Partnership with all these responsibilities included within our remit and scope.

One of the reasons for me thinking that we are in a ‘fortunate’ position is because we already have a settled organisational and managerial structure in place and everyone through the organisation knows exactly what job they will be doing six months from now.  This means that we can continue to get on with the day job of planning and delivering services for our local population.

Yes we still have the same challenges as everyone else, for example, in terms of different governance structures and indeed the financial challenges that are facing all the new Partnerships, but we and our local stakeholders are ready to address those from a position of relative stability.

While the broader integration agenda has not been driven by cost reduction, there is no doubt that it can deliver a contribution with the reduction of management costs. Even a small Partnership the size of ours is making more than £500k savings every year from reduced management costs and with no reduction in quality. Having already delivered on these management savings however it does make the continued search for further cost reduction ever more challenging.

It is important to emphasise that the new Partnerships are as much about the delivery of services as they are about planning and commissioning. The underpinning of our integrated arrangements came from many years of single management, co-location and joint working in services such as mental health, addictions and learning disability and this provided both the Council and the NHS Board with the comfort and reassurance back in 2010 that the CHCP model would work well in West Dunbartonshire.

I know that you will find these types of examples in every part of Scotland and I am sure that they will provide the same foundation for the creation and development of successful new Partnerships as they have done for us here in West Dunbartonshire.

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