Our third Blog from our Bradford and Craven Community of Practice for Primary Care looks at how the VCS may be the answer to some of the current challenges we face.
Our community of practice is a collaborative, evolving space where professionals learn, connect, and drive real change in healthcare access, service integration, and patient outcomes.
Everybody loves a winner, and it was an absolute pleasure to accompany Keighley Healthy Living one of our local VCSE’s to the Kings Fund awards in May and see them win a national award for the work they do to connect their services and activities to our local health priorities for primary care and our populations.
Keighley Healthy Living Chief Executive Melanie Hey has been an active member of our community of Practice since we started and brings a wealth of experience and expertise to our discussions. Mel’s can-do attitude is tempered by what is possible and her understanding of what funders and the health system will want.
As a community of practice we have discussed at length some of the successful projects that helped KHL win the GSK Kings Fund Impact award, including the Blood Pressure Connect service which works well finding undiagnosed hypertension and offering non-medical support and lifestyle interventions to improve blood pressure. Other current projects that complement Primary healthcare and local healthcare priorities are Mental Health Connect and Rethinking Pain.
Find out more about KHLs award winning work and impact here: Our Impact | Keighley Healthy Living | West Yorkshire
In our April Community of Practice session held at the VCS Alliance offices we had a deep dive into how the VCS sector can help with the challenges primary care and our wider health system are facing. Some of our key findings were.
Our local VCS can provide:
- Capacity – The VCS has the capacity to support primary care.
- Highly skilled VCS team members are able to spend one to one time with patients to affect lifestyle change or provide support.
- The VCS can facilitate group sessions such as exercise classes, befriending groups and peer to peer support.
- The VCS can provide qualitative and quantitative evidence gathering, feedback and insight from patients attending sessions.
- Value for money – though not a free resource the VCS can provide low-cost high impact services and can mobilise these services quickly.
What our local VCS needs to improve services:
- More access to systems and to patient records
- Scaling up services to avoid a postcode lottery – e.g. different parts of Bradford can have different offers.
- Commissioning through the VCS Alliance allows for safer, more consistent work to be mobilised in the VCSE sector.
As we head into a time of system change and re organisation, leaders and decision makers will do well to reflect on the value and quality of services provided by our VCS colleagues. Perhaps now is the time to trust, embed and spread the support that they can offer across our wider Bradford health system.
The blog was co -written by Bill Graham, community of practice facilitator & Kerrie Lee Barr and Jess Seymour from the Bradford VCS Alliance.
The VCS Alliance is the trusted health and care Infrastructure Support Organisation (ISO) in Bradford District and Craven, bridging the gap between the Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, and the health and care system. The VCS Alliance acts as a risk bearer for the VCSE, allowing the health system to invest safely into services in the community.