Community, Health and Social Care

The Strategic Director, Community, Health and Social Care is Sue Lightup.

Community, Health and Social Care directorate contributes towards achieving the city council vision and has its own mission statement which focuses on its specific contribution:

"To improve the life chances of Salford citizens and to promote the independence of individuals and communities in Salford through choice and control"

The directorate leads on the delivery of three portfolio areas: Community Services and Health, which includes Adult Social Care Culture Sport and Leisure and Service Development/Neighbourhoods.

The directorate commissions many services - for example, Salford Community Leisure and also works in partnership with provider organisations, communities and individuals to develop and deliver services and activities that help create the best possible life for the people of Salford. Citizen involvement at all levels is central to the work of the directorate - for example through community committees and partnership boards.

The directorate’s 2009/2010 budget includes gross expenditure of £119 million and income of £46 million.

Helping citizens maintain and improve their health and independence benefits individuals directly. Helping citizens do this in their communities makes the communities stronger and more cohesive.

Health and adult health services national context

The white paper, 'Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services' set a new direction for the whole health and social care system leading to a radical and sustained shift in how investment in services is made and in how services are delivered. The shift is towards:

• prevention
• public health and well-being
• tackling inequalities
• more focused support for people with long-term conditions
• more services provided outside of hospitals, closer to people

Change will be driven locally - by people using services and by professionals providing them. We are in the middle of making this shift.

Putting People First is a national concordat between central and local government, the NHS, care professionals and care providers to work with service users and carers to transform people’s experience of local [social] support and services. Instead of offering ‘vulnerable people’ a choice from a range of services which we can arrange, the transformation agenda means starting with the service user. We will ask them to identify their social support needs and how they think these needs can be met. We will then work with them to deliver the support/services which will meet the needs. Crucially, there is no definition of what constitutes a service or support.

Local context

To this end, we have successfully developed, particularly in partnership with older citizens, a range of preventative initiatives that provide opportunities for older citizens to stay active and engaged through a range of leisure, social and educational activities. Such initiatives dovetail with the strategic goals of the PCT, preventing debilitating poor health and empowering individuals to have greater responsibility for their own health.

We have laid the foundation for the successful extension of more personalised services, enabling individuals to have more control over their lives. This year we will be introducing self-directed support and individual budgets, which mean service users self-assessing, using a resource allocation system to calculate a cost of support that the council will agree and offering the service user a choice about how their allocation is spent - by the council arranging services on their behalf, through a direct payment where the service user is given the cash and has to arrange their own support or through a mixture of spending options. We have a target of 1,600 service users having utilised self directed support by March 2010.

The council has maintained its eligibility criteria so that it still supports people with less severe needs in order to retain a strong preventative focus to maintain independence for as long as possible.

This page was last updated on 6 June 2011