Recommissioning Community Equipment Services across Lancashire

Purpose	The Community Equipment Service is a support service which buys, delivers, collects and, where appropriate, recycles items of both health and social care equipment to aid daily living which have been arranged by health or social care professionals for people living in Lancashire (excluding Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen). The main purpose of the Service is to provide equipment on loan to people living in the community. This allows them to do tasks they would otherwise be unable to do or provides support to a carer to allow on-going care in their home. The aim of the Service is to: - supply, deliver and fit or adjust items of equipment requested by health and social care professionals - repair, maintain and refurbish them as necessary - collect, decontaminate and recycle them - or withdraw them from use if they cannot be recycled. This is provided for all ages within Lancashire free of charge and should be done in a timely manner that meets the needs of service users as determined by an assessment carried out by a health or social care professional. The process for how service users are assessed and criteria for entitlement will not change in any way. What is changing? For service users, very little will change and any change will be an improvement. All the equipment (over 40,000 items) will continue to be available and delivered directly to the service user. The main change is to ensure everyone in Lancashire will get the same service no matter where they live and that the quality of this service will be to the same (in some cases a higher) standard. Ensuring these standards apply across Lancashire means the service needs to be retendered, which may result in a different or new Provider. The six local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups in Lancashire and Lancashire County Council are working together so that a number of operational improvements can be made. This will lead to more cost effective purchasing of equipment, better stock management and improved processes. The service also needs to respond to stronger and better working arrangements between health and social care. The NHS and Lancashire County Council have developed a new specification for the service which sets out how the service must be provided and identifies the standards which the service provider must meet. We want feedback from service users and potential service users about how strongly they agree with the main standards we are proposing that will impact on service users.
Subject	Community based health services
Commissioned by	NHS Lancashire North Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG); NHS Fylde and Wyre CCG; NHS West Lancashire CCG; NHS Greater Preston CCG; NHS Chorley and South Ribble CCG; East Lancashire CCG; and Lancashire County Council

Geographic area	All of Lancashire
Method	Questionnaire - online Questionnaire - postal
Consultation with	General public Service users
Date	17/09/2014 - 29/09/2014
Undertaken by	NHS Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit

Project document(s)

Report(s)

Community Equipment Services survey document

Contact information

For more information about this research contact:

Jeremy Scholey, NHS Midlands and Lancashire, Commissioning Support Unit
Email: jeremy.scholey@lancashirecsu.nhs.uk