|
Partnerships for Older People
During 2005 Manchester City Council formally submitted a proposal to the first stage of the Department of Health’s new “Partnerships for Older People’s Projects” fund. POPPs (as it has inevitably become known) is available to fund innovative approaches which will support older people to live independently, to have a better quality of life and to avoid the need for hospital and other high intensity care. It is a condition of the funding that the bid must be a partnership approach but led by the Local Authority. The bid was approved by the Department of Health bringing in £2.6million to Manchester over the next two years. The work splits into three areas: the Gateway , Business Improvement support for voluntary sector groups and a programme of Grants. Within this section, there is a page on each of these workstreams. You can also use the online forum to discuss POPPs. All of the POPPs work is being overseen by a Programme Board which includes members from all sectors:
MACC worked to co-ordinate the voluntary and community sector contribution to this process. The work done for the initial stage involved a number of organisations who identified the need for business development support for voluntary and community sector groups who provide low-level support to older people but don't have the capacity to engage in the new contract and commissioning culture. You can download the paper submitted to the City Council as a voluntary sector contribution to the bid here:
The POPP Programme The POPP programme had two waves of projects and Manchester was one of the first sites to be developed in April of 2006, one of 19 across the country. A further 10 sites were developed in 2007. Other sites developed in the North West were Bradford, Wigan, Oldham, Rochdale and Tameside. These areas delivered a wide range of smaller local projects aimed at supporting the independence of local older people. The Manchester Programme The aims of the Manchester programme were to provide more low-level support and preventative approaches to care in the community and to improve the health, well-being and interdependence of older adults, preventing or delaying the need for higher intensity and more costly care. There was recognition that the voluntary and community sector was already a major source of support for older people in need of services and opportunities that contributed to their health and well-being. Because of this, one of the key features of the Manchester programme was to gather evidence about these kinds of services which could be used to create a sustainable shift in resources and culture. The intention was that the additional investment from POPP would enable a move away from institutionalised and hospital crisis care and towards earlier intervention - support in people’s own homes and neighbourhoods. The overall strategy was to improve the quality of life for older people now and in the longer term. The Manchester programme of work was divided into three workstreams:
The Manchester POPP programme was evaluated both nationally by the University of Hertfordshire and locally by Manchester Metropolitan University. From the beginning, there was a challenge faced by the programme: with projects lasting for, at most, only two years and with many starting from scratch, there was a concern that there would be relatively little time to gather real evidence of the improvements and achievements of preventative services. The question is a familiar one: how can you measure how preventative activity leads to ‘improved well being’? Perhaps the most important point established in the evaluation of the POPP programme is that it is possible to measure the impact of prevention - and that this can be use to inform commissioning processes, using quality life tools and routinely collected data. The evaluation identified a number of achievements including:
The results also show that for every £1 spent on POPP an average of £0.73 will be saved on the per month cost of emergency hospital bed days (the cost of a bed-day is assumed to be £120). Another key message was the recognition of the value of involving older people themselves and the voluntary and community sector in service planning and delivery. Sustainability Alongside evaluation, sustaining these new and improved services after the POPP funding ended was always going to a major problem. Maintaining commitments during the present financial climate with reconfiguration and yet more financial constraints Throughout, the requirement has been that where projects have demonstrated effectiveness and improved outcomes, every effort should be made to ensure that improved outcomes should be sustained. At national level, the guidance focused on reinvesting savings made: sustainability could be achieved through through “service redesign and redirecting funding from across the system (most commonly acute services and residential care services)” (from the Interim Report of Progress, Personal Social Services Research Unit) Some of the projects produce clear net savings such as a drop in the numbers of emergency bed days or people moving into residential or nursing home care. The impact of other projects is harder to measure but is clearly they still improve older people’s quality of life through exercise, improving older people’s mental well-being, supporting and protecting the rights of older people through advocacy services. There is broad agreement between NHS Manchester and the City Council’s Department of Adult Social Care that a joint approach to these preventative services is a good investment – indeed, many of Manchester’s POPP projects have been sustained through to the end of March 2009 as a result of this approach. The question is what happens next – has the “shift in resources and culture” been made as a long term plan for health and social care in Manchester? There are 19 POPP projects in Manchester waiting for decisions to be made about their future beyond March 2009. For the National Evaluation click here. |
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
© Copyright 2008 Manchester Alliance for Community Care
Swan Buildings, 20 Swan Street, Ancoats, Manchester M4 5JW
