A health and care partnership working for a better quality of life in a thriving mid and south Essex, with every resident enabled to make informed choices in a strengthened health and care system.
Central to our vision is our desire to come together in a broad and equal partnership of individuals, organisations and agencies. Working together, our shared focus will be on fairness, prevention, early support and providing high quality, joined-up health and social care services when and where people need them.
Our Integrated Care Strategy explains our commitment to work alongside our local authority partners, voluntary, community and faith groups, along with social enterprise organisations, our local residents and others to help improve local health and wellbeing.
What our population and partners have told us
This Joint Forward Plan was informed by health and care partners and people living within the local community.
We invited residents to join us in a range of workshops based in community settings across mid and south Essex, including open access sessions and sessions targeted at specific groups who experience inequality in access, experience and outcomes.
Things we have heard include:
- Timely and easier access to health and care services is very important.
- Faster and easier access to better quality primary care services such as GP, pharmacy and dental services.
- Work with communities to build on shared ambitions.
- Community care teams should work together more to offer seamless care.
- Community services should be delivered closer to where people live.
- Patients want more involvement in the decision making around their care.
- Make sure we understand what our workforce needs to help us plan for the future.
- Wherever possible, to ensure our universal services are accessible to all.
The scale of the challenge we face
We must be realistic about the challenges faced by the NHS nationally and locally. As the demand for complex care across all services rises and our population ages, we often duplicate care or fail to deliver joined up, personalised support.
Key challenges we recognise:
Recruitment and retention of workforce is an ongoing challenge. We face particular shortfalls in primary care, doctors, nurses, support workers and allied healthcare professionals (in some clinical specialist areas) in recent years.
We struggle to maintain national standards in some areas and more people are ending up in hospital, some stay longer than necessary.
Demand for our local health and care services has grown. The cost of delivering care is more than the funding we are given.
Staff shortages mean we rely on more expensive agency staff to fill our rotas. We are seeing more people with multiple long terms conditions struggling to cope (and ending up in our hospitals) means the cost of providing care is more than it should be in mid and south Essex.