Issue - meetings

To receive a presentation by Audrey Fitzpatrick on Cheshire East Community Health.

Audrey Fitzpatrick, Director of Nursing and Quality and Deputy Managing Director, Cheshire East Community Health, briefed the Committee on the role of Cheshire East Community Health (CECH).  CECH was the provider of community services to Central and Eastern Cheshire PCT and was formally launched on 30 June 2008.

CECH served a population of 460,000 and had a budget of £56m. It provided 26 Core Services which could be broken down into 83 sub specialities.  Services were mainly commissioned by the PCT but also by three Practice Based Commissioning Consortia.  The mission statement of CECH was “To deliver a positive patient experience through what we do and how we do it”.   CECH had various strategic objectives including establishing strong and effective partnerships with the community to ensure that patients, clients and carers experienced high quality and seamless care and support, to increase the accessibility and equity of high quality healthcare to the community and develop the use of technology to improve the delivery of quality based care.

A programme to transform Community Services had been launched on 13 January 2009 to transform delivery, ensure a patient centred approach focused on quality and outcomes and transactional change looking at costs, contracts, performance management and value for money.

CECH had made an interim declaration on healthcare and applied for registration which would come into effect in April 2010.  The activities CECH was to be regulated for were urgent care services and treatment of disease, disorder or injury. 

Members of the Committee were then given the opportunity to ask questions/raise issues as follows:

      How were cross boundary issues dealt with?  In response the Committee was advised that there was work underway looking at out of area services, a patient registered with a PCT GP would be looked after by a PCT District Nurse and the focus would be on the patient;

      The role of the Urgent Care Centre was discussed and the Committee was advised that every PCT was required to have one such centre in its patch, in Central and Eastern Cheshire an Urgent Care Centre was situated at Mid Cheshire Hospital Trust site at Leighton Hospital and enabled patients to see a GP for urgent care.  They were particularly effective in urban city centres where they were popular with full time employees and young people etc.

RESOLVED:  That the report be noted and the role of the Urgent Care Centre be discussed at the mid point meeting.