Connected Care is about integrating health, social Care and housing services for local communities. To do this Turning Point Centre of Excellence is working with Bolton Primary Care Trust, Bolton Council, Bolton Community Homes and three local communities in Bolton:
The aim is to design and improve services that better meet the needs of local people.
Turning Point Centre of Excellence has spent considerable time getting to know and understand the local community and speak to local groups. This helped to get an understanding of the priorities and challenges facing the local areas. We have spent time communicating the key messages of Connected Care, giving people reasons to become engaged and making them aware of what is involved. We put together a leaflet with key messages about Connected Care for communities. We also found out whether community members would be interested in becoming Community Researchers or involved with the audit/research by being interviewed or completing a questionnaire.
The next stage was to recruit and train people to become Community Researchers from the local community in the three areas. The training looked at design and delivery of research methods and working with difficult to engage groups and took place between January and April 2008.
The Community Researchers then carried out research in the three Connected Care areas. There were various ways people took part in the Connected Care audit:
- filling out a questionnaire
- being interviewed by a Community Researcher
- taking part in a focus group
- attending a have your say event
In Farnworth 749 took part in the audit, in Halliwell 458 and in Deane/Derby 477.
Now that the audit has been completed a report will be produced in Jan/Feb 2009 with recommendations for developing services which the partner agencies across health, housing and social care have agreed to act upon.
The Connected Care programme is part of the Government’s Adults Facing Chronic Exclusion Programme in Bolton, one of twelve pilots supported by Cabinet designed to test new approaches to tackling social exclusion.
We have put together a report that gathers information from previous research and consultations that have already taken place in the community to help identify the priorities locally.