Health and Social Care
Chief Officers Spotlight: Julie White
June 26, 2015 by Linda White 2 Comments | Category Uncategorized
These are exciting times in Dumfries and Galloway! Not only are we in the process of integrating our Health and Social Care services but we are also building a new, state of the art District General Hospital and embarking upon a huge clinical change programme to enable us to deliver a sustainable model of health and social care for the future.
Like all other health and social care systems, we have been faced with increasing demands against our limited resources. We have successfully managed another difficult Winter period through the hard work and efforts of our multi-agency teams and the partnerships we have with our colleagues in the third and independent sectors. Looking to the future, however, we need to develop new ways of working which result in better health and wellbeing in our communities and an improved experience for service users and their families.
Health and social care integration is our opportunity to ensure that the future looks significantly different. Our model in Dumfries & Galloway focuses on pooling our resources and expertise in each of the region’s natural localities, building on the assets available in our communities, to design services in the best way to meet local identified needs. We are one of two partnerships in Scotland proposing to integrate the entirety of our Acute services alongside primary care, mental health, community-based services and social care services within an Integration Joint Board.
A sustainable future for health and social care requires transformational change. We believe our chance of success is vastly improved by encouraging greater transparency of pressures and demands on the whole system, facilitating more radical solutions. Our model will help us to work collaboratively to generate new ways of supporting people using the totality of the resource we have available to us.
All of the evidence tells us that a system focused purely on structural change in integration will fail. People and relationships are key to the success of any model. In addition to our work engaging with staff, partners and local communities, we recently held a very successful event “Building Valued Relationships: Enabling Meaningful Integration Conference“.
Attended by around 150 practitioners and partners across health and social care, the event provided us with an opportunity to showcase some of the best work going on in the area in relation to integration. We also began the process of creating greater resilience within our workforce and developed a deeper understanding of the connection between meaningful relationships, based on clarity of purpose, shared values, trust and respect.
There are few short cuts or ‘magic bullets’ in order to ensure success from integration. We need to work with and for our local communities, building capacity and resilience, utilising the richness of the assets we have available to us in order to jointly develop and deliver that sustainable future.
Tags: Chief Officer, Dumfries and Galloway, health and social care, Hospital, Integration
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Interesting post about what is happening in a place that mirrors non urban Scotland. The decision to include the acute sector within the integration board is an exciting one that could presage the future reconfiguration of health and social care outwith the big cities.
An interesting update on what is happening in a Board that mirrors that vast majority of non urban Scotland – especially like the attempt to get all the practitioners in the same room together.