New models of care
The third element of healthy place shaping aims to re-shape health, wellbeing and care services, and the infrastructure which supports them, to achieve health benefits and promote prevention, including health services, social care, leisure and recreation services, and community centres.
Other initiatives support prevention by informing residents about how they can better care for themselves, and using social media to promote online resources and information about local services that promote health and wellbeing.
Social prescribing
Social prescribing is a means of enabling health professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services. These often include voluntary sector or informal activities which can reduce isolation, increase physical activity and improve wellbeing for people referred.
Funding and responsibility for social prescribing is now mostly channelled through Primary Care Networks (PCNs) - groupings of GP surgeries serving populations of around 30–50,000 patients. Most PCNs sub-contract social prescribing to local 3rd sector organisations including Age UK, Citizens Advice, Oxfordshire MIND, Guideposts and SOFEA; a few PCNs employ social prescribing staff directly.
More information about social prescribing
For information on Oxfordshire social prescribing services ask your GP practice for a referral to their ‘Link worker’.
Self-care
Self-care is about keeping fit and healthy, understanding when you can look after yourself, when a pharmacist can help, and when to get advice from your GP or another health professional. If you have a long-term condition, self-care is about understanding that condition and how to live with it.
Self-care is recommended when you have a minor condition which doesn’t normally need medical care (from a doctor or nurse) or any treatment in order to get better. In practice this means a person decides that they can manage their illness without seeing a doctor. ‘Self-care’ is something millions of us do every day – for positive and practical reasons – but sometimes it can be confusing to know what is the best thing to do for your health and well-being– particularly if you look at the internet.
Resources
Wellbeing pages on this website
Follow our local Facebook pages which will keep you up to date with local activities to support your health and well-being:
- HealthyBicester facebook page for Bicester
- K5 Better together facebook page for Kidlington
Making every contact count
MECC is an approach that uses opportunistic conversations in everyday life to talk about health-related behaviour. It involves responding appropriately to cues from others to encourage them to think about behaviour change and steps that they could take to improve their health and wellbeing.
MECC training involves giving people in contact with members of the public the skills and confidence to have brief conversations about health with others and to follow up with signposting for support.
A MECC interaction takes a matter of minutes and is not intended to add to existing busy workloads, rather it is structured to fit into and complement existing conversations. You don’t need to become an expert in the topic of health or the services you might signpost people to. It’s about being more effective during the conversation and taking an opportunity to help someone.
We encourage a ‘Train the Trainer’ approach for sustainability so that organisations can cascade training within their own teams, where appropriate.
To find out more about MECC training or MECC Train-the-Trainer courses, email bobicb.personalisedcaretraining@nhs.net
Integrated neighbourhood working
In recent years there has been an increasing policy focus on enabling general practice to work in a more integrated way with community health and social care services. Primary care networks (PCNs) form a key building block of the NHS long-term plan and bring general practices together to work at scale to address the health and well-being needs of their local population.
They operate on a neighbourhood footprint covering populations of between 30,000 and 50,000. They are expected to take a proactive approach to manage population health and assessing the needs of their local population to identify people who would benefit from targeted, proactive support.
Community and mental health services and social care are expected to configure their services around PCN boundaries to offer more integrated care for people with more complex needs, providing proactive and anticipatory care.