Aberdeen’s Integration Joint Board (IJB) has agreed to move from four to three localities – to help Aberdeen City Health & Social Care Partnership (ACHSP) provide services tailored to the needs of local communities.
Each of the three new ACHSCP localities will include an Aberdeen Community Planning Partnership priority locality – and the three localities will be aligned with existing city neighbourhoods, which are Aberdeen’s natural communities.
Localities bring together health and social care professionals, partner organisations, service users and other stakeholders to help plan how to transform local services and shift resources towards prevention and a community-focus.
The IJB has recognised the commitment and input of a wide range of colleagues, stakeholders and members of the public who have been involved in locality working to date. The new arrangements will be brought in over a period of time and the approach will be very much based on working closely with interested people and groups.
During a comprehensive consultation this winter on the proposal to move to three localities, respondents were overall in favour of the change and overwhelming agreed that more joined-up locality planning arrangements would bring big benefits.
The consultation exercise highlighted existing challenges, including the terminology used to describe localities. Discussions with partners will now be held to discuss the best ways of defining health and social care partnership localities and community planning localities.
Concerns were also raised that the proposals could see the focus of health and social care shift towards communities that experience multiple deprivation.
But IJB chair Councillor Sarah Duncan said: “The vision of the Partnership is to enable people to achieve fulfilling, healthy lives – and it is well known that people experiencing multiple deprivation often have poorer health outcomes. It’s therefore appropriate that the Partnership seeks to address this health and wellbeing gap.
“But the Partnership’s focus on improving outcomes covers everyone – the whole of the city and all of its communities – and so no one will lose out because of the move to three localities.”
The consultation process also identified a number of actions that will now be put in place to help strengthen locality working.
Why are we moving to three localities?
The IJB chose to move to three localities to deliver benefits, including:
• Opportunities for greater efficiencies in terms of data-sharing and delivery planning etc.
• Opportunities for collaboration and realising benefits for people in communities as a result of better collaborative working.
• Opportunities for better alignment between wider locality plans and smaller area plans.
• Opportunities to empower multi-agency teams to look at what’s important to people in our communities as part of their journey through life.
• Opportunities to support a cross-system response to complex issues like obesity and population-wide public health priorities.
• Opportunities for teams to be based together, guiding what is planned and progressing initiatives by involving a range of staff teams and partner organisations.
What happens next?
Work will now start on the move to three localities:
• A planned approach will be taken to strengthen opportunities for locality working – both from the perspective of service delivery and in terms of community participation and engagement.
• The approach will be one of co-production and working closely with people, communities and organisations.
• An ‘easy-read’ locality profile and action plan will be developed.
• Locality Leadership Groups will be realigned to the new localities.
• Strong leadership and support from the Partnership will help empower and enable the success of locality working. This will include direct reporting to the IJB on progress made and barriers encountered.
• Opportunities will be identified for the co-location of a range of customer-facing services, including housing, health and social care, and children’s services.
A further report on implementation will come to the IJB in November 2019.
The full report on the new locality model to the IJB’s 26 March meeting is available here.
