Wendy Scott’s message for our workforce
We have been really lucky because the workforce has been integral in to the service model that we have got in place at the moment. So they will be really pleased to know that we have taken upon all of their recommendations and what we are looking at is four key areas of service delivery. We’re looking at inpatient, an intensive support team, a community team and a forensic type service for people with a learning disability and autism.
I think there is some real excitement about that we will be moving forward to having specific service for people with a learning disability and not just seeing people with a mental health problem, so health facilitation is going to be a huge part of their role in the future and health inequalities work.
The benefits of doing our transformation and evaluation of our learning disabilities services for our service users is that in 2011 when we first started the journey following the Panorama programme of the Winterbourne review we had a huge amount of people out of area in specialist LD hospitals. Since we have begun the programme and you continue to do all the good work you are currently doing we now only have a few people out of area and our ambition is that we will not admit people to hospital unless absolutely necessary.
It is your commitment to how you have already addressed so much change means that we are really achieving that in Suffolk the benefit is that we will have the care in the right place in the right time for people.
I think there’s going to be som different ways of working for staff that perhaps some different way of resourcing services that we need. So at the moment we have what we call four learning disability liaison nurses and yet I have no idea but we have got 50+ GP surgeries, something like that, so we know that is not enough to meet need. So we know that there is going to be some different roles we know that we are going to need perhaps less care in inpatient services but we are still going to need a really, very highly skilled team to deliver that care in the community. So it is about our services expanding and evolving and utilising the specialist learning disability and autistic skills that we have got in the current workforce and developing the future workforce.
I wanted to take this opportunity to really thank the workforce across health and social care because it is your feedback that has really shaped how the service will look in the future and how they already do look because I know that you’ve already been making some changes and for me that really demonstrates your enthusiasm and commitment to this piece of work.
You know, I can sit here but it is you that will make the change and you that is making the change so that you ever so much for your support.
You can find more information on the #averydifferentconversation workforce page.
