Making Care Closer to Home work for Enfield

Throughout 2017 Healthwatch Enfield took an active role in informing the blueprint for Care Closer to Home Integrated Networks (CHINs) and advocating for the need to involve local people; embedding co-production as a preferred method of designing, delivering and evaluating this future delivery model. Because the discussions around the CHIN development had not significantly involved local people, in December 2017, Healthwatch Enfield hosted an engagement event where nearly 90 residents and health and care professionals working in the borough participated in workshops to start a discussion on how to make CHINs work for Enfield.

Through bringing together local residents and professionals, representing a wide cross section of the community, to co-design solutions, Healthwatch Enfield facilitated discussions around the potential scope of the CHIN model for Enfield. The report's conclusion, based on the workshop, is that local people are seeking a CHIN that supports and furthers the Self-Care agenda and sees the patient as the expert, enabled to take a proactive approach, within a flexible service delivery model reinforced by a new commissioning framework.

The report recommends that Enfield Council and NHS Enfield Clinical Commissioning Group work with local people to co-produce Care Closer to Home Integrated Networks that support the population’s needs. Healthwatch Enfield recommend the co-production model uses ideas and suggestions contained within this report as the basis of conversations with local residents; engages in an ongoing dialogue with the local communities to test and further develop the CHINs model for Enfield through organising targeted outreach, going to where people already ‘meet’; and that it works across professional and organisational boundaries, involving local people in decisions around commissioning, delivering and evaluating CHINs.