To mark National Self-Care Week, PAGB is excited to publish its latest report – a compendium highlighting examples of best practice from across England of how Integrated Care Services (ICSs) and local care providers have gone above and beyond to support self-care, and how similar work could be reproduced across the country. You can read the report here.
Across England, Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are taking proactive steps to identify and address local issues and gaps in services and to undertake projects that aim to improve support for and promote self-care. To support ICSs in sharing and learning from examples of best practice, our report entitled “Supporting self-care: an ICS best practice compendium” provides an overview of four case studies from ICSs that have successfully implemented initiatives to empower their local populations to self-care for minor conditions, and highlights learnings and top tips to help other teams to design and implement their own successful self-care initiatives.
The report shines a light on work and projects that have successfully sought to enhance understanding of self-care among the public and NHS staff; empower people to self-care; and tackle digital inequalities. These projects include:
- A self-care medicines toolkit designed by Community Pharmacy Cheshire and Wirral to help healthcare professionals in providing advice on treatment of self-care conditions and how patients can access the medicines they need from a community pharmacy without a prescription
- A Children’s Health App (CATCH – Common Approach to Children’s Health) produced by Cheshire and Merseyside ICS to reduce the number of visits to A&E made by parents with young children, providing NHS recommended advice and information on how to access 999 or 111 for emergency childcare
- A digital health tools formulary commissioned by Dorset ICS to provide its local population with a library of trustworthy and accredited health apps to facilitate self-care for minor and long-term conditions
- A digital health and care small grants programme produced and funded by Sussex ICS to tackle digital exclusion by providing one-off grants for organisations with projects to improve awareness of digital tools such as the NHS App and NHS 111
The success of these projects highlights the work that can be done on a local scale to improve support for people to self-care and demonstrates the potential benefits that could be realised if replicated by ICSs across England. Supporting self-care will play a key role as the Government and NHS continue their aim to shift care from hospitals to communities – these case studies provide ICSs with a blueprint with which they can support self-care within communities and embed it within primary care and public behaviours.
