Self Care and Care Planning

Introduction
In a speech in January 2008 Gordon Brown, the prime minister, committed the Department of Health (DH) to produce a patients' prospectus setting out how they will provide a choice of self care services to the 15 million people with long term care needs in England.

Self care is an important element of personalisation and self directed care. The white paper Our Health, Our Care, Our Say sets out a vision for the health and social care system, emphasising the importance of supported self care in developing and delivering services that are based around the needs of the individual and in partnership with them. More recently this vision has been reinforced in High Quality Care for All the final report from the NHS Next Stage Review by Lord Darzi.

Personalised care planning is about addressing a person's full range of needs, recognising that there are other issues, in addition to medical ones, that can impact on health and well being. It is central to embedding the personalisation of care and services.

Expert patients programme (EPP)
The purpose of Expert Patients Programme Community Interest Company (EPP CIC) is to establish the principle of individual self management and self care as a recognised public health measure, deliverable in a cost effective and sustained way. Their main aim is to improve the quality of life for people with long term health conditions.

EPP CIC was created to enable people to have greater access to courses designed to support them in improving the day to day management of their condition.

EPP CIC have consolidated regional teams, to create focused and effective operational groups. The regional teams are dedicated to working closely with commissioning organisations, to ensure that the implementation of regional programmes run smoothly and that effective local marketing techniques are used in the recruitment of participants.

Information prescriptions
Information plays a crucial role in supporting people with long term conditions to take care of themselves and improve their quality of life. Up to now, there has been no way to ensure that a person will have access to or receive the right information when they need it most, at diagnosis and as their needs continue. Information prescriptions will give everyone access to the information they need, at the right time.

The role of pharmacists
Pharmacies have a specific role in providing self care support. The new community pharmacy contract puts pharmacists at the centre of promoting self care interventions for people with minor ailments and long term conditions. With an increasing availability of medicines over the counter (eg statins), pharmacists have a responsibility to ensure that people are given advice on the correct use of their medicines.

New roles for pharmacy are emerging and various opportunities exist for pharmacists to be further involved with the self care agenda, education and training initiatives etc.

Telecare and Assistive Technology
Telecare offers the promise of enabling thousands of people to live independently, in control and with dignity for longer and agencies should work together to deliver the wider application of new technologies to support the safety and security of people with long term conditions, such as falls alarms and sensors enabling self care. This has signifiicant implications on the health and social care workforce from training and education to new roles and new ways of working.

The Foundation for Assistive Technology (FAST) works with the assistive technology community to support innovation in product development and good practice in service provision.

Workforce planning
Effective workforce planning in long term conditions ensures you will have a workforce of the right size, with the right skills, organised in the right way within the budget that you can afford, delivering services to provide the best possible care. The Six Step guide to integrated workforce planning has been specifically designed to enable planning in this regard.

Skills for health have been invited to present at the forthcoming Managing Long Term Conditions - personalised care planning and self care conference on 16th September taking place in central London. Under the theme 'skills and knowledge for supportive self care', Karen Walker and Kate Byrne will be delivering a presentation focusing on developing the workforce to support self care. This presentation will be available after the event under the workforce planning resources section below.

Skills for Health
Skills for Health and Skills for Care have worked with key stakeholders to develop a set of Common Core Principles for Supporting Self Care. The common core principles for the health and social care workforce have been informed by best practice and based on the needs of service users and their carers. These are generic principles to be used across all areas of health and social care.

Skills for Health has developed a series of Long Term Conditions, completed competences to describe what individuals need to do, what they need to know and which skills they need to carry out an activity.

A list of Self Care useful links and websites on this subject can be found here>>>