Community providers are saying that now is the time to be serious about making care closer to home a reality as they launch an awareness week recognising the important contribution being made treating people in the community.

Celebrating Community Services, which is hosted by the NHS Confederation and NHS Providers Community Network, returns from 7-11 October.

Under the banner 'creating a sustainable community sector for the future', the week will showcase the role, breadth, importance and successes of community health services and staff across England. It will also identify ways that policymakers can enable community providers to go further faster to achieve one of the government’s major shifts of ‘hospital to community care’ and ‘treatment to prevention’.

In recent months, the Community Network, which is hosted jointly by NHS Providers and the NHS Confederation, has explored how the solutions the NHS will need in the future exist in areas such as Urgent Community Response, frailty and the community workforce – as well as demonstrating the support needed to maximise their benefits.

As part of the week, the network will publish a series of interviews with community provider leaders which focus on why they are proud to work in the sector, the positive impacts their services have on communities and how they can be enabled to achieve the new government’s key shifts.

Solutions identified by community providers include:

• Enabling funding to follow the ambition to ensure community providers can deliver on the long-term vision to support more people to live well at, or closer to, their home.
• Scaling up community led initiatives such as UCR and virtual wards, which are crucial to keeping people well in their own home.
• Ensuring there is sufficient revenue and capital funding available for community providers over multiple years. This will be important in boosting digital capacity, data sharing and integrated working all of which can improve efficiency and productivity in the long term.
• Funding and implementing the NHS long term workforce plan in full, delivering on the commitment to grow the community workforce.
• Urgently providing the same focus and attention on children’s services as adults services.
• Accelerating the national programme of work to deliver high quality, timely data in the community sector, and developing a consistent set of metrics that capture the range of activity delivered in the community, which will reduce unwarranted variation and enable effective measurement of productivity.

Siobhan Melia, chair of the Community Network, said:

“Community services are there for people at every stage of their life. They help people to start well, live well and age well and that breadth of services is really unique. It's a particularly exciting time for the community sector at the moment as there is a real national focus on the development of pathways of care outside of hospitals, a focus on prevention and also a focus on joining up care around where people live in local neighbourhoods. So this is a really fantastic opportunity for us to continue to raise the profile of what happens in community services.

“But it is now essential that we start to move from rhetoric to reality in bringing care closer to home.

“As the government draws up its 10-year plan for the NHS following Lord Darzi’s report it’s time for decisive national action to make bring about the shift to community promised by successive governments. Our members have identified opportunities, including the hard-wiring of financial flows which encourage the shift from hospital to community and investing in community health services should be a priority.

“Demand has surged. At the last count, 1.1 million people were waiting for community services.

“We can’t go on like this. An under-pressure NHS is seeing more people with more complex, long-term conditions as well as an ageing population.

“Community providers are constantly innovating to meet these ambitions and give people the right care in the right place at the right time.

“With meaningful and sustainable support, community health services are ready and willing to work with the government to provide even more vital, joined-up care with partners across the NHS and the social care system.

• You can get involved in the week using the hashtag #CelebratingCommunityServices.
  
  

Contact