Our lives profoundly affect our health and vice versa. This is why personalised care – which sees people not as a collection of symptoms and impairments but as rounded human beings with a past, a present and a future – is so important.
Personalised care offers people with complex health conditions time and space to explain how they are feeling, and choice and control over their health and wellbeing, with support if they need it.
While all care should be personalised, there is a national Personalised Care programme with six elements: shared decision-making, personalised care and support planning, enabling choice, social prescribing and community-based support, supported self-management, and personal health budgets.
For people who have issues affecting their health that medical treatment can’t solve, personalised care offers consistent, compassionate, practical support by:
- social prescribers who connect them to local services and activities that meet their specific needs
- health and wellbeing coaches who explore what matters to them and give them the tools and motivation to achieve it
- care coordinators who are the bridge between them and health and care teams, helping them get the care they need.
Delivery of the programme in north east London (NEL) is coordinated by the NHS North East London Personalised Care team working in partnership with general practice, primary care networks (which have a crucial role to play in developing these approaches), place-based partnerships, voluntary and community groups and, increasingly, hospital trusts.
This is dramatically improving the lives of many people whose health is affected by depression, pain, poverty, grief and loneliness in north east London, and helping them to manage more independently day-to-day.
It is also helping NHS North East London and North East London Health and Care Partnership to achieve our shared ambition to work with and for all the people of north east London to create meaningful improvements in health, wellbeing and equity.