Transforming Community Services


Public consultation Monday 4 October to Friday 29 October

 

What Transforming Community Services Means for Your NHS

 

This document introduces Transforming Community Services to you. It covers three important things:

 

    1. What are community health services and what is Transforming Community Services all about?
    2. What does this mean to you as service users?
    3. What happens next?

 

 

1. What are community health services and what is Transforming Community Services all about?

 

Community health services in Walsall are currently managed by Walsall Community Health, part of NHS Walsall. They include a wide range of health care services provided for patients in their own homes, in local health centres and from a variety of community bases as well as many children’s health services, health visitors, health promotion (for example, ‘quit smoking’ services), physiotherapy, district nurses, specialist nurses, rehabilitation, speech and language therapy and much more.
Transforming Community Services is about bringing together a number of your community health services so that you get better co-ordinated, more efficient and high quality care. Our plan is to bring these different services together under the same management, which will mean that improvements to services can be made more quickly, more easily and more efficiently.
Work has been going on for some time in Walsall and with our key health service partners in the Black Country to enable this service change to happen. Transforming Community Services, a national initiative, provides us with the opportunity to speed things up and manage the process more effectively on your behalf.

 

 

2. What does this mean to you as service users


These changes will take place over the next 12 months but they are unlikely to bring about any immediate changes to where or when you receive your care as this will still be provided by existing teams of staff within the NHS. By bringing these healthcare organisations together, our aim is to ensure that you will receive the best possible patient experience – moving you smoothly through the different stages of treatment and care.
As local people and our service users, your views and advice in helping us to shape our services have always been very important to us and this will continue.  As we change, we will be asking for your support in ensuring the services we offer continue to meet your needs.

 

What happens next?


We have been working with our local NHS partner organisations (Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust and Sandwell Mental Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust) as well as GPs, Walsall Borough Council and other groups, including those representing patients and the public, to look at how each community service will be most effectively managed and delivered. 


From this work, we have come up with the following proposals to develop integrated services providers:

 

    1. 

Bring together the majority of community health services and services currently provided by Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust into one organisation. This will mean that for you as patients, service provision is co-ordinated ensuring that you can move smoothly through all areas of your treatment and care

 

    2.

To ensure that we deliver specialist local care for people with learning disabilities, we propose to transfer the management of these services to Sandwell Mental Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust. As specialists in their field, we think that they are best placed to co-ordinate and manage this level of local care.

 

    3. We are working with other partners in the Black Country to co-ordinate Community Dental Services into a new service which will provide specialist dental support. This will cover Birmingham and the Black Country and will be managed by the proposed NHS Community Foundation Trust based in Birmingham.  This will not affect any of the services you get from your NHS dentist as they will continue to be provided locally.

 

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to explain how we will be making your health care better co-ordinated and more effective.  These are our early proposals for Transforming Community Services, but we will make sure that we keep you regularly informed about its progress.

 

 

Public consultation on Transforming Community Services: Monday 4 October to Friday

 

29 October

 

During October, we are carrying out a formal public consultation on the Transforming Community Services proposals and we want to hear from you if you have any comments, queries or concerns.

 

If you would like to share your views with us you can do so in the following ways:

 

     ·  Via the online feedback form on this website http://www.walsall.nhs.uk/Have_your_say/Feedback

     · By email to consultations@walsall.nhs.uk

 

More information is also available from the websites of our partner organisations:


Walsall Community Health: www.walsallcommunityhealth.nhs.uk
Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust: www.walsallhospitals.nhs.uk
Sandwell Mental Health and Social Care Foundation Trust: www.smhft.nhs.uk