Are you ready to implement new Neighbourhood Health Centres?
The UK Government has recently released a 10 Year Health Plan for England, aiming to create a new model of care that is fit for the future.
A core part of the Plan is the ‘Neighbourhood Health Service’ model. The Neighbourhood Health Service aspires to bring care into local communities, through neighbourhood health centres (NHCs). This will be implemented through the National Neighbourhood Health Implementation Programme (NNHIP), which aims to accelerate the work Places and ICBs are already doing or planning to do, through learning together, sharing solutions, tackling challenges and delivering improvement.
NHCs will be established in every community but will be prioritised in areas where healthy life expectancy is lowest. These new NHCs will be a ‘one stop shop’ for patient care, and a place from which multidisciplinary teams can operate.
Strata is uniquely placed to support the review of existing services and the planning of neighbourhood health services, as it is the only data mapping tool that brings together community health information, population growth projections and NHS property information in one place.
NHS organisations are already using Strata to identify and prioritise which neighbourhoods will get the most benefit from new facilities. Users of the tool are analysing neighbourhoods by levels of deprivation, disease prevalence and life expectancy to support submissions to be part of the first wave for NNHIP.
Strata also then allows the overlaying of current estate locations and information, such as building condition, year of construction, occupancy and vacancy information, plus travel times by various modes of transport to understand how accessible services are.
ICBs can then take this a step further to get more specific information bespoke to their region. The Strata team can superimpose local information such as hospital admission rates and neighbourhood boundaries to further support neighbourhood planning work.
Birmingham and Solihull (BSOL) was highlighted in the NHS’s Plan as pioneering the shift from hospital to community. The ICB used our tool to ensure it can provide the best care for residents in all their different communities. Overall, BSOL has the highest level of deprivation of all ICBs, with the health and social care challenges faced by residents varying dramatically between individual neighbourhoods. The team uses the application to concentrate on relocating services from main hospitals into the community. By deploying multidisciplinary teams and implementing a new data-led care model, they’ve had some impressive results. Their new hub in East Birmingham, Washwood Heath, has seen A&E attendances fall by over 30% in 12 months among targeted patients, and length of hospital stay fall 14%.
By ensuring you fully understand your neighbourhoods, you’re in good shape to begin to progress plans on where your first NHCs should be, and ensure your services are tailored to the communities they serve.
Find out more about how Strata can help with Neighbourhood Planning. Speak to a member of the team at help@stratasoftware.net
