The key issues for the health and social care system are well known:
- a rapidly changing landscape
- increasingly challenged budgets
- rising demand
- opportunities for devolution
- a need for greater collaboration.
The Government’s recent announcements have recognised, but not solved, the financial problems and have emphasised the need for collaboration by extending the scale and longevity of the Better Care Fund and requiring by 2017 plans to achieve full integration by 2020.
CIPFA believes that collaboration is eased by mutual understanding, but that the worlds of health and local government finance are different in many ways. The greatest success in integration will come when everyone has a common and shared understanding of what is being discussed and what needs to be achieved. CIPFA is, therefore, looking for ways to help finance professionals develop an open, transparent and informed partnership with colleagues across organisations and sectors.
CIPFA has developed a training resource, designed to help. CIPFA trainers can visit your ‘health and social care economy’ to carry out the training in joint session with the key local players in health and social care finance. We believe this approach has an added value as it:
- builds local collaboration, communication and team-working into the training itself
- allows local health and social care finance staff to become aware of what they do and don’t know about each others’ organisations
- facilitates discussion of particular local circumstances
- means that accounts of health and social care practices can be fine-tuned through delegates’ comments to take account of particular local circumstances
- makes it possible to agree how to take forward matters arising across the whole system
- saves on participants’ travel time and costs.
To find out more about taking this route forward click the link below or contact E: SocialCareNetwork@cipfa.org.
Find out more.