Nicky Poulain >> My name’s Nicky Poulain and I work for Luton clinical commissioning
group, and my job title’s Director of commissioning and integration.
So that is very closely working with Luton Borough Council, so the Integrated Personal
Commissioning, the acronym IPC, is a key part of my role, working with the local authority,
erm, we’re trying to get personalised, patient centred care, across the cohort of patients
we’ve selected is dementia.
So one of the problems we’re trying to help patients with dementia, particularly the carers,
is the independence.
We have highlighted dementia to our board, recognising that Luton is one of the pilot
sites, so it’s high profile, we’ve had some board, er, what we call patient stories
and recently, about a couple of months’ ago, the husband of a patient with dementia
explained how his life was enormously impacted by having no independence because his wife
couldn’t be left.
So the IPC opportunity has allowed him to spend some money, which was somebody sitting
with his wife doing some interesting activities, so it was stimulating to his wife, but actually
gave him the independence to go and have some me time.
The IPC is a flagship for Luton, as a start it’s the opportunity of the patient, voluntary
sector, working with the LBC (which is the local authority) and the CCG, seeing it as
one organisation.
Because at the moment, we have experience of patients feeling that the health addresses
the health issues, social care addresses the social care.
For us, it is the opportunity for us to work together, focussing totally on the patient
and the family.
For us then, it’s keeping that personalised, what does the patient want, what’s important
to the patient’s lives, and using the resources we have, and we have previously in the past
spent what we thought was right, perhaps not asking.
So it’s again putting the control to the patient.
So, Luton CCG and Luton Borough Council have jointly worked with the Alzheimer Society
for a while, but the IPC has been superb this year, because we’ve done some bespoke work
with them where we’ve co-produced some literature with patients, so that’s been one of our,
er, outcomes, in the first few months.
In two years’ time, I would hope that every patient with dementia has one the opportunity
of having a personalised budget, and that would be ensuring that the care plan that
the health professionals create with that patient is totally their choice, when they’ve
made their choice that we put the resources to meet those needs, er, it then becomes a
true person centred, health and the local authority working together for the patient
and the family.
Nicky >> There are operational challenges of introducing personal budgets.
One is the finances, it’s the pooled budgets, all of those are straightforward if we take
them step by step, and that’s what the IPC will give us.
Working with the other pilot sites, if we were to do it alone, just Luton, I don’t
think we would achieve it, but that’s the beauty of this programme, of having the national
team and the other sites working together, and we’ve done that work this morning so
we’re on that journey.