Staff feelings must be considered

Partnership working often fails because no
account is taken of people’s emotions, a Department of Health
official told a London conference on alternatives to care trusts
last week.

Andrea
Campbell, director of the North-West regional secure commissioning
team, said it was essential to take account of the feelings of
those being asked to work in partnership, particularly given the
rival orthodoxies of the health and social models of
care.

“What
we find is that, if we can understand how it feels for people, then
we can work round it. We need to move ourselves beyond the personal
feeling that somehow something is going to be taken away from us,”
she said.

Linda
Tully, Older People Task Force project manager for the Trent
regional DoH office, said the sector needed to broaden its horizons
when considering alternatives to care trusts.

“We
automatically think about social care and health. But we need to
think further than that. We need to include the police and
education.”

Tully
said she was concerned that the calls for “seamless care” could
result in the loss of specialisms, and instead backed the notion of
“strong seams” to prevent organisations splitting from each other
and patients falling through gaps.

“Partnerships are about
forgetting what organisation you work for,” Tully said. “It is
about thinking what we can do for the patient. It is not about
dumping on one organisation. It is about giving and taking. And it
is about learning the difficulties that different organisations
have to cope with.”

Carole
Rouse, head of primary care at Huntingdon Primary Care Trust, said
it was important for partnerships to be able to evolve and not be
restrictive in their membership.

She
said Huntingdon’s partnership arrangements on intermediate care had
involved transferring social services home care staff under
Transfer of Undertaking (Protection of Employment) arrangements to
a multi-disciplinary intermediate care team and transferring skills
between team members. For example nurses could now carry out
neurological assessments. All of this had been achieved without
becoming a care trust, she added.

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