Integrated Home and Community Care services to remain in-house
Ken Whelan (Chief Executive Officer, Capital & Coast DHB) provides the following update:
Over the last year Capital & Coast DHB has been taking a look at the way Integrated Home and Community Care (including Community Nursing and Allied Health) are delivered, and whether there was merit in involving external providers in their delivery.
After much research and discussion, I recommended that we should keep these services in-house, and the Board has endorsed that decision at its June meeting.
I think it was a very worthwhile piece of work to examine the options, and at the end of the day there was widespread agreement that the DHB should continue in its role as the provider of these services.
That isn’t to say that our systems for delivering these services are perfect – we can improve. In making this decision we have acknowledged that we need to review the way we do things, and look for ways to redevelop our delivery of these services. To ensure we make progress on that a small team of community health staff and management will work together to develop a framework and implementation plan for the delivery of community care services into the future. This plan will be presented to the Board in October, and progress will be reviewed in 12 months time.
I want to thank our staff and those in the community, who provided us with their thoughts and insights on the various options which have been under consideration over the past year or so. That feedback has given us some really useful guidance which will prove invaluable as we look for ways to improve the delivery of these important services.
And I want to pay particular tribute to the teams in our Community Health Services, who have worked hard to implement a lot of positive changes and developments over the past year. Our decision to continue delivering these services in-house to a large extent reflects our faith in our own staff to achieve further improvements in the way we deliver these services. The Board’s decision can, in many ways, be seen as a vote of confidence in those skilled and dedicated teams.
There’s still a fair bit of work ahead to achieve integration of these services with the continuum of care. Any changes we end up proposing in the year ahead will be within the current budgets and with the current staff and contracted care providers.
