Connecting Care Summative Report, Wakefield

In 2017, Healthwatch Wakefield produced a report which concluded a three-year evaluation of the “Connecting Care” initiative in Wakefield.

The report presents the results of almost 1000 interviews with service users, carers, and staff of the services involved.

The overall summary findings included:

• The Connecting Care programme has not been implemented as originally intended. It struggled in a challenging context, and with less management focus than it required.

• Staff have hugely valued the experience of working in Connecting Care, and have developed and improved relationships across teams as the programme has progressed

• The programme has led to improvements in the co-ordination, responsiveness, and quality of services experienced by many patients and (some, but not all) carers.

• The programme has not had any clear impact on use of bed-based services, and therefore no clear overall financial impact

The improvements seen were achieved without actually moving on to fully implement any of the originally intended objectives, these improvements included:

• Community-based teams able to provide a crisis response within two hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

• Open access to both health and social care services, via a single triage point

• Care co-ordination for complex cases

• A team whose purpose is to go into the acute hospital, and assess the opportunity for facilitated early discharge

• Common electronic care records across health and social services, using the NHS number as a common identifier.

The report holds extensive detail of the outlined summary above, however at the time of publication there was no response from providers and commissioners of services.