LEICESTERSHIRE PARTNERSHIP NHS TRUST, SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT, FINAL REPORT

Following extended discussion and a number of meetings, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between Leicester City PCT and Leicester Council of Faiths was signed on 31 March 2009. This contract ended formally on 31 May 2012. Here's an amended version of the final report on this agreement, that I submitted today. All these topics are covered extensively throughout this blog.

We were originally contracted to work with Leicester City PCT but got caught up in redeployment issues within the NHS locally, both of staff and of responsibilities. Management of our contract was put into the hands of the Integrated Equalities Team at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust. Consequently (and through no fault of our own) it took longer than we would have liked for actual work to take place in furthering the aims of our SLA.

NHS Staff Multifaith Resource

Following a year and more of consultation among the eight member communites of Leicester Council of Faiths and a variety of other communities of religion or belief (Humanist, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormon, Pagan, Rastafarian, Spiritualist), Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust published a Staff Multifaith Resource. This pack provides the following information in the same order, for each of the communities of religion or belief included:

• Introduction and local information
• Mode of greeting
• Birth
• Examination of patient
• Particular sensitivities
• Washing, ablutions and personal hygiene
• Modesty and dress
• Special dietary requirements
• Fasting
• Family planning
• Abortion
• Care in serious (or final stages of) illness
• Blood transfusion / transplants
• Organ donation
• Spiritual advisor / counsellor
• Death
• Religious symbols
• Post mortem
• Burial / cremation
• General considerations for community nurses visiting patients at home

The Multifaith Staff Resource was officially launched during Inter Faith Week 2011 with three lunchtime meetings on consecutive days in the Brandon Unit, Glenfield Hospital. (Tue 22 Nov), Mansion House, Glenfield Hospital (Wed 23 Nov) and at Leicester General (Thu 24 Nov).

Shortly before the end of 2011, a programme of induction began for ward staff in the city, county and Rutland and for Community Teams in the same areas and for the Trust’s Spiritual and Pastoral Care Team. This induction programme was delivered alongside Abida Hussain, the Trust’s Equalities and Human Rights Officer.

Faith Community Health Ambassadors

The idea for this project originated in a full meeting of Leicester Council of Faiths at the Welcome Centre (13 July 2010), on the topic of health inequalities. This meeting was addressed by Deb Watson (Director of Public Health, Leicester City PCT) and her Assistant Director, Rod Moore.  Deb also presented a refined version of this proposal at the Council of Faiths AGM (21 Oct 2010). Since this programme kicked into action, around 30 short video interviews have been conducted with individuals from a variety of backgrounds of religion or belief for use in training of staff with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust. In these videos, subjects answer questions about how their religion or belief impact on their health and how they access healthcare services. Contributors identified with a particular religion or belief as follows: 

• 2 Baha’is
• 5 Buddhists
• 4 Christians
• 7 Hindus
• 1 Humanist
• 2 Jews
• 6 Muslims
• 1 Rastafarian
• 1 Secularist
• 3 Sikhs

Equality Delivery System

We were invited to take part in community consultation on LPT’s equality objectives at two meetings: 10 March 2011 at the Towers and (with an extended group of stakeholders)  8 March 2011 at Mansion House, Glenfield Hospital.

These meetings led to progress on the development of LPT’s Equality Delivery System (EDS). I was asked to participate in a meeting with a variety of stakeholders to grade LPT’s Equality Delivery System at the Peepul Centre, Orchardson Avenue, Monday 27 February 2012.

The same individuals who were recorded for the Faith Community Health Ambassadors project were contacted and asked to take part in a community engagement review of LPT’s Equality Delivery System in a meeting at Merlyn Vaz Health & Social Care Centre, Spinney Hill Road on Wednesday 28 November. Although only two people turned up in person, several other responses were received by post.

Impact attendant on proposed closure of children’s heart unit at Glenfield Hospital

I was asked to coordinate the Council of Faiths’ response to impacts attendant on the possible closure of the children’s heart unit at Glenfield Hospital. Following a one-to-one briefing with Christina Marriott, ?? at LPT HQ, Lakeside, Grove Park, Monday 28 May 2012, members were canvassed for their responses, then a three page-long response was submitted, 30 May 2012. 

CONNECTED COMMUNITIES: HEALTHCARE, MARKETS AND SERVICE DELIVERY

At Leicester Adult Education College today, for “Connected Communities: Healthcare, Markets and Service Delivery”. The workshop is being held in the college's Hansom Hall. This part of the college was recently renamed in honour of Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803–82), the prolific architect who designed buildings that were to become the city's New Walk Museum & Art Gallery and part of Leicester Adult Education College. He's best known for inventing the Hansom Cab, a ubiquitous feature of 19th Century streets in several countries, which made its first journey on Hinckley's Coventry Road in 1835.

The Coalition Government envisages the future NHS as “the largest social enterprise sector in the world”. Part of this vision involves drawing the non-profit or ‘third sector’ into the welfare mix as a provider of care alongside statutory services. This workshop will clarify the nature and role of current and new relationships that will be needed for the “Big Society” to succeed.

This study is concerned with how diverse groups, communities and organisations hope to work and collaborate in order to play a productive and effective role in the fast-changing healthcare and social policy landscape. The aim of today's workshop is to provide a conducive environment and a safe forum for discussion of issues of common concern and so that further research can be conducted. 

The workshop is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), in partnership with other leading UK research councils. It is part of a scoping study and review on the theme, Connected Communities”.

The researchers aim to present the views of participants at workshops and other events in an impartial manner to that future research agendas can be established on sound evidence and practice. The research findings will be written up as academic journal papers, a report to the AHRC and will be presented at seminars and conferences.

We’ve been told beforehand that the research project has the following aims:

• To identify what connections and partnerships work in the sector at present and are likely to work in the future.
• To discover what kinds of new connectivities will be developed in the new markets for healthcare delivery.
• To examine what new sacrifices and new benefits the new environment will bring for patients and local communities. 
  

And that our participation will bring the following benefits to our communities of interest:

• Presentation of leading-edge research into what connections and partnerships matter for effective service delivery.
• Practical group exercises to identify key partnerships that currently work.
• Concrete ideas on next-generation connections and partnerships.
  

I get to display the Council of Faiths pop-up banner at the back of the hall. I was hoping that more of the community-based organisations represented today would want to display themselves in this way, but we’re the only one. We'd like to think that the Council of Faiths would be high up on the team sheet when this kind of event is being organised or this kind of project is being planned. We hope it could be said that the faith communities of Leicester are able to demonstrate a special kind of connectedness that can inform – and be informed by – such an event and project. On the other hand, when we put our minds to it we can also show a kind of disconnectedness – from each other and from society at large – that would probably beat virtually all others hands down!

Attendees are distributed around five tables, six people of mixed background, experience and interest round each one. I’m seated with Chino Cabon from The Race Equality Centre (TREC), Dee Martin from Leicestershire Centre for Integrated Living (LCIL) both of whom I work with on a regular basis in the Regional Equlity and Diversity Partnership (REDP) and Parmjit Basra from Leicester Adult Skills and Learning Service (LASALS) with whom I've worked most notably on Leicester Speaks. Some of us wonder if we’ve been corralled, so that we’re not able to mix our opinions in with others whom we don’t work with on a regular basis – a cynical notion that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, I hope! The facilitator on our table is Prof. Carlo Ruzza, Co-investigator, AHRC Funding Award on "Connected Communities" at the University of Leicester’s Department of Sociology.

The session is opened by Dr Ming Lim, Lead Investigator, AHRC Funding Award on "Connected Communities" at the University of Leicester’s School of Management. She directs us to two icebreaker questions for each table. Firstly: “If you were to describe the NHS as an animal, which animal would you choose and why?” Here are some of the answers that we came up with around our table:

• Gazelle: beautiful to behold, elegant and at home in its natural environment, blissfully unaware that just out of shot, a hungry lion is racing toward it, greedy death in its jaws.
• Ostrich: with its head in the sand, hiding from reality.
• Duck billed platypus: a bit of this and a bit of that, stitched together in an improbable unlikely and unconvincing manner.
• Giraffe: head in the clouds, with only a tenuous relationship with reality.
• Human being: claiming allegiance to one set of principles, but acting in a contrary way.
  

And secondly: “If the NHS’s service delivery was a form of transport, which one would it be and why?” Here are some of the answers that were offered around the tables:

• Edinburgh's ill-fated tram system: they’ve spent most of their budget laying the foundations of a new system and now find that it’s been ruined by having normal traffic drive over the rails. Now they don't think there's enough money left in the coffers either to finish it or to scrap it – which would cost more than the former! (oops – is my Glaswegain schadenfreude showing through?)
• Bus: involves queuing, sometimes not being able to get a seat and it not going all the way to where you want to go (amongst other drawbacks).
• Oil tanker: hard to manoeuvre, hard to change course, disastrous consequences if it sinks or runs aground.
• Bus in rural Africa: no timetable, no fixed route, too many people in too small a vehicle – but still it does the job.
• UFO: some people report having had a close encounter with it, others are sceptical about its very existence (a stage whisper mentioned something about both involving people being subjected to undue amounts of “probing” but it went by unremarked upon).
• Bennie railplane: a revolutionary system that was supposed to be the future of public transport, abandoned by the diversion of resources into war and eventually scrapped.
• Earliest motor car: capable of going much faster than it did, held back by the requirement that it be preceded by a man waving a red flag.

After the icebreakers, we’re invited to take part in group discussions to help further this study. Each table is asked to consider three questions:

Question 1 In 2010, the government released a White paper on proposed reform to the NHS. One of its key proposals is that, for patients thee should be “no decision about me without me.” What is the significance of this focus on patient and user engagement for your organisation? 

Question 2 How do you think you can improve relations with your users and the community you serve in this time of change in the NHS?

Question 3 How have financial pressures over the last couple of years affected your organisation and your level of service delivery? 

I’m just putting the questions themselves in this blog entry, rather than picking and choosing from the wide range of responses. Perhaps you may be able to think of what some of the responses might have been, faithful reader – and to come up with a few of your own.

During the lunch break, members of the research team take the notes from the five tables off into another room, identify some headline themes, topics and comments from them and compile them into some slides that Dr Lim presents to us all after lunch. There’s speed and efficiency for you! So the afternoon session comprises Dr Lim debriefing us all from slides, followed by a “roving mic”session, in which attendees respond to the content of these slides and whether they represent fairly the things we discussed earlier in the day.

After the formal end of the workshop, several attendees stay behind to be interviewed for the study individually or in small groups (anonymously).

This would appear to be an interesting, timely useful project. I hope that Leicester Council of Faiths has the opportunity to be involved in the long term and to contribute positively to its progress and outcomes. There are ways in which it would appear to be complementary to our Faith Communities Health Champions initiative. We'd hope that our involvement in each of these projects would offer some crossover experience and learning, by which could inform the other.

In the photo above: Prof. Carlo Ruzza (left) and Dr Ming Lim (right).

EMAS "COMMUNITY IN UNITY" EVENT

To Nottingham this morning for "Community in Unity", an event led by East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS), at the city's Council House. I'm here representing both Leicester Council of Faiths and the Regional Equality and Diversity Partnership (REDP) along with Project Officer Kelly Jussab and Researcher Carolyn Pasco.

There's a range of displays, covering different aspects of EMAS's work as well as other patient support services in the region, such as:

• Amaani Tallawah African Caribbean Mental Health Service
• Awaaz-Asian Mental Health Resource Unit
• Bassetlaw Primary Care Trust
• Community Building Services
• Cooperative Community Action
• Digital Switchover Help Scheme
• Nottingham University Hospitals Patient and Public Involvement
• Sherwood Forest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

The morning session begins with a brief dramatised presentation by Amaani Tallawah (whose name means "Peace and Impressive Strength"). This group has been supporting and empowering the African Caribbean community in Nottingham on mental health issues for over 20 years. Right after that we launch into a "World Cafe" consultation (as popularised throughout the region by REDP), involving a mix of practitioners, managers, strategists, service users, patients and their carers. What would appear to be small issues for the NHS can appear insurmountable obstacles to individuals and their families. In these times of straitened circumstances, service providers have to put their heads together and see how to tackle such issues and make the most of their resources, in terms of budgets and personnel.

Leicester Council of Faiths has had a positive and productive association with East Midlands Ambulance Service since I've been in my post: we helped them organise a "Faiths Summit" in Leicester, summer 2008; they paid for part of our exhibition that was created for Inter Faith Week 2009; and as part of REDP, we've been helping EMAS develop their Community Engagement Strategy this year.

Thanks to Nicci Crawford for the photo.