Enabling personalised care

Personalised care is all about giving people more choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered based on “what matters to them” and their individual strengths, needs and preferences.

The Coventry & Warwickshire Personalisation Programme is focused on creating the conditions and commitment to enable Personalised Care to become embedded, thrive and ultimately become 'business as usual' in our Integrated Care System.

Our ambitions are to:

• achieve better experiences and health outcomes for people by embedding the six components of the universal personalised care model across our health and care services. 
• reduce health inequalities by focusing on what matters to people, taking into account their circumstances, challenges and assets, enabling everyone to have the opportunity to lead a healthy life.

We want to promote and embed a personalised care approach across all of our workforce, and reflect personalised care in our integrated care pathways and commissioned services across the Coventry & Warwickshire system.

Our aim is to be clear about what this means for practitioners and providers, and to empower individuals to be active and prepared participants in their own care.

As we collaborate more as health and care service providers to align what we do, personalised care means:

• putting the care receiver at the heart of this integration and the centre point of a whole-system approach – ensuring “what matters to you” is listened to and understood
• continuity of care and an all-age approach from maternity and childhood right through to end of life, encompassing both mental and physical health
• a new relationship between care receivers and care providers.

Personalised care has significant links across this strategy and, especially with health inequalities - by focusing on what matters to people, taking account of their circumstances, challenges and assets, and giving everyone the opportunity to lead a healthy life, no matter where they live or who they are. We want to promote and embed a personalised care approach across all of our workforce and reflect personalised care in our integrated care pathways and commissioned services across the Coventry and Warwickshire system. Our aim is to be clear about what this means for practitioners and providers and to empower individuals to be active and prepared participants in their own care.

 
What are we doing already? 

Personalised care is a priority for the NHS nationally. It is one of the five key focus areas for change outlined in the NHS Long Term Plan. There is work underway already in the system, to develop a more consistent understanding of and set of practices around personalised care and a strategy for how this is implemented across Coventry and Warwickshire.

The C&W personalisation programme has produced a strategy for 22/24 setting out the programme’s ambitions and approach for embedding personalised care across our system, supporting each of the Trusts, place partnerships, primary care and social care. 

The programme has identified five principles of personalised care:

• it starts with the principle of “what matters to you” as opposed to “what’s the matter with you?”
• it’s about shared power and collaboration between people, families, and health professionals.
• it enables people to have choice and control over their lives.
• it moves people from being passive recipients of services to active citizens.
• it is about getting a life, not a service.

We are working towards a universal service standard that builds in personalisation and is flexible enough to accommodate specific needs as well as more common ones. A key part of this will be how we better understand service access, patient experience and personal requirements.

For further detail, contact the ICS Personalisation team at geh.cwpersonalisation@nhs.net.

 

What will change in our ways of working?

• Further integration to deliver enhanced personalisation, choice and flexibility for people accessing health and care services.
• Joined up sharing of patient records and information across partners in the system.
• Better experiences and health outcomes for people by an embedded universal personalised care (UPC) model across our system, place and neighbourhoods. 
• A reduction in health inequalities driven by greater access and trust in services and delivery of personalised care.
• A population more empowered and supported to manage their health and wellbeing.

 

What actions are we prioritising?

• Develop and clearly communicate to all health and care practitioners what we mean by personalised care and a set of working practices to support its implementation and adoption.
• Support each of our Trusts, place partnerships and primary care colleagues to identify opportunities to embed personalised care approaches.  
• Support our workforce through training to better understand and be equipped to deliver personalised care.
• Support our people and patients to share “what matters to them” in their health care interactions.  
• Evaluate the impact for people/patients, staff and our system.