Joining up health and social care in East Sussex
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This website brings you the latest news on the work of the East Sussex Health and Social Care Partnership to join up health and social care in our county.
Our East Sussex Health and Care Partnership brings together East Sussex County Council, East Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group, East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust and Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and our wider system partners including Primary Care Networks, District and Borough Councils, Registered Landlords, Healthwatch, and the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector.
We’ve been working together for several years to help improve the health and wellbeing of local people, reduce health inequalities across East Sussex, and break down barriers between health and social care.
We want people to live healthier lives for longer and have access to the best possible services and support.
By working in such a joined-up way, we’re able to serve the whole of East Sussex even more effectively.
As well as working together in East Sussex, we’re also part of the Sussex Health and Care Partnership Integrated Care System (ICS). This is a partnership of health and care organisations working together across Sussex. Working as part of the ICS means we can plan and co-ordinate services at an even wider scale.
On this website you can:
- Keep up to date on health and social care integration and health and social care news in East Sussex.
- Find out about joint health and social care events, and how you can get involved.
- Contact us with your questions about health and social care integration in East Sussex.
- Sign up to our newsletter for a monthly round up of health and social care news stories.
Our priorities
Working together as partners has been essential in supporting our response to COVID-19. Recently we’ve updated our local plans to set out how we’ll continue to develop our joint working even more, and to support our system’s recovery from COVID. This is called the East Sussex Health and Care Partnership Plan. The plan focuses on our shared priorities for; addressing health inequalities and the causes of reduced healthy life expectancy, community health and social care integration, children and young people, mental health, planned care and urgent care.
Download a summary of the East Sussex Health and Care Partnership Plan.
You can also read about our top priorities for 2021/2022 here:
Addressing health inequalities
We’ll build on our existing progress to help people stay healthy and well for as long as possible, receive personalised care and support, reduce health inequalities, and reduce the gap in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy in the county.
We’ll do this by working with all the services that impact on and influence health and wellbeing, like housing, employment, and leisure. We’ll also work with local people to empower them to make healthy choices throughout their lives.
Joining up community health and social care
We’re taking steps for our community health and social care services to become even more joined up. For example, having shared leadership, developing a new team to help people avoid hospital admission when they don’t need it, and leave hospital quickly when they’re ready to be discharged. We’ll also work with our Primary Care Networks to make sure:
- people are receiving proactive care that anticipates their needs
- there is joined up support for people with long term care needs and conditions and those in care homes, including where people are at the end of their lives.
Joining up children and young people’s services
We’ll improve existing support to children and young people focusing on:
- improving services for mental health, emotional wellbeing, Autism, ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders
- support for vulnerable young people at risk and looked after children
- support for children and young people with disabilities
- activities that promote health
Expanding support for mental health
We’ll expand our support for people with mental health needs by:
- making sure people have access to a full range of services that support emotional wellbeing in primary care
- extra support in the community to help avoid unnecessary inpatient admissions, and support recovery
- working with housing teams and providers to support people who also need help with housing and accommodation.
Urgent care
We’ll continue to improve support for people with urgent care needs, including:
- targeted support for vulnerable people
- a quicker and more efficient urgent response
- supporting people in care homes who need urgent care
- building on the introduction of our Integrated Urgent Care model, and the Urgent Treatment Centres.
Planned care
We’ll continue to improve services that deliver planned care for local people including:
- more innovative outpatient care through new technology and better organisation of services
- making sure people are receiving treatment and interventions based on the latest evidence
- taking action to improve waits for treatment where this is too long
- continuing to support best practice with prescribing and medicines.
We’ll also be working on priority areas that exist across the whole of Sussex, including: primary and community care, long term conditions, supporting hospital discharge, cancer, mental health, learning disabilities and autism, children and young people, and maternity.
You can read more about these Sussex-wide priorities on the SHCP website.
Find out more about our partners
You can find out more about each partner on their website:
East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust
Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust
NHS East Sussex Clinical Commissioning Group.
We also work closely with wider partners in the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, and local district and borough councils.
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