Transforming Your Care Director addresses Pensioners’ Parliament

Mrs McCreedy said that by 2022 the number of older people will increase by 26% and told the Parliament that the changes proposed under Transforming Your Care were essential for ensuring safe, resilient and high quality care into the future.

“People are living longer and this is fantastic and a testament to the health and social care services we provide, however, this also means increased demand of services together with the increasing prevalence of long term conditions such as respiratory, diabetes and stroke. Also, the rising cost of technologies, drugs and inflation are to be considered.  It is therefore vitally important that we prepare our services for the future,” she said.

The Transforming Your Care Director outlined a range of projects and initiatives introduced to help improve services for older people offering them more choice and independence. These included:

• Investments in assistive technology, for example, homes with gadgets that can monitor falls to help keep people safer at home and also telehealth and telemonitoring equipment which can send  vital statistics to a GP surgery remotely for monitoring, saving people from having to make the journey to local health centres or clinics.
• £4m investment in reablement over the last few years. After a period of illness or crisis, reablement aims to help people get back to being independent and relearn the skills necessary for daily living such as washing, dressing, making their dinner or getting out and about. Previously people may have gone in to a residential home or received domiciliary care upon discharge from hospital. It is already available across three Health and Social Care Trust areas, and rollout is continuing in the other two.
• Progress on the newly established 17 Integrated Care Partnerships and how they are working in local areas to reshape how the health and social care system plans and responds to delivering care for the frail elderly, respiratory, diabetes, stroke and end of life care.
• In the Northern area, Integrated Care Partnerships have worked together to develop community rapid response teams which will respond within 60 minutes to assess a patient and arrange support services to enable them to remain at home.  Also, where a GP believes that a patient needs more support but may not require an emergency admission to hospital, GPs are now able to make a single call to ensure that a coordinated package of nursing and social care support is put in place to enable the patient to remain at home. 
• In the Western area, they are delivering a range of targeted health and wellbeing programmes targeted at the frail elderly, including the development of an integrated falls prevention pathway. Falls prevention is an important aspect of keeping the frail elderly well and reducing hospital admissions.

Mrs McCreedy also provided an update on the Making Choices consultation on the future of statutory residential care homes, which finished in March, as the post consultation report is due to be published in June.

Mrs McCreedy added: “These examples of change are about how Transforming Your Care initiatives are making real impacts for our patients, users and their families.  But there is no room for complacency. It is often said that change is a journey, and making and sustaining changes in our health and social services is no different.

“Looking ahead there is still much for us to do across the whole health and social care system, we are just now beginning the second year of our journey of implementation. 

“We need to continue to deliver planned, measured thoughtful change with proper investment and time given to building alternatives and new services.

“We remain committed to the vision set out in Transforming Your Care which aims to provide people with support, choices and dignity as they grow older.”   

For the latest developments in Transforming Your Care and to view how change has impacted on real people’s lives log on to www.tycconsultation.hscni.net