Sheffield Local Involvement Network

Sheffield City Council is holding a consultation on its proposal to fundamentally change the way some intermediate care is provided. Currently, Hazelhurst and Sevenfields resource centres provide 42 intermediate care beds for people aged 65 and over.

The proposal is to 'to stop having the 42 beds at Sevenfields and Hazelhurst and use the money to buy alternative care to meet current needs based on demand' and this would include providing intermediate care in nursing homes'. The consultation is open until 29 February, go to our Current Consultations for more information and to find out how to have your say.

More than 40 people attended January's Discussion Forum, which was given over entirely to the plans for HealthWatch (HW). The Government's news two weeks earlier that local HW would now start in April 2013 rather than October 2012 had taken us all by surprise. Kate Register, Quality and Involvement Manager at Sheffield City Council (SCC), who is managing the transition to HW was our only speaker and gave a very informative presentation (available on request from the LINk office).

HW in Sheffield will include all of LINk’s watchdog type work and adds 2 very different elements; signposting information for people and NHS complaints advocacy. She also gave an update on the Council’s work on planning HW and how the pathfinder bid put together by SCC, LINk and Voluntary Action Sheffield was successful. The Council have held 3 workshops around HW and a draft vision for Sheffield HealthWatch has been developed.

Sheffield City Council's (SCC) Adult Social Care and Support services are holding a meeting at the end of January outlining how they plan to manage with less money next year. They are interested in hearing the views of:

• adults with a learning disability, mental health condition, disabled adult or older person who uses adult social care services
• carers
• organisations and people with an interest in this area.

The event takes place at the Town Hall on Tuesday 31 January from 2:00 to 4:00pm

To book your place please CLOAKING or call 0114 273 5417.

Click here to see more about SCC's budget consultation.

The first LINk Bulletin of 2012 is packed with information and news. It includes:

• a call to complete our survey "Sheffield LInk - how are we doing?"
• get involved with your GP practice's Patient Group or a Council group looking at older people's services
• write ups of Decenber's Discussion Forum and Chinese community health event
• upcoming events on diabetes support and looking after your heart
• information on the range of care alarms available from City Wide Care Alarms
• a call for your thoughts on how to improve and update our website.

Click here to see all previous copies of Sheffield LINk's Bulletin.

A new wing is being planned for The Children’s Hospital and you are invited to give comments on the six designs being considered. The new wing will include a more distinctive main entrance, a new out patients department for many specialties and three new wards with a higher number of single en-suite bed rooms. Car parking on site is also being considered as part of the scheme. Please note that the closing date for responses is Friday 20 January.

Six architects are competing to design the new wing and their six concepts can be viewed online, on the B floor corridor in the Hospital and in the Winter Gardens.  A panel including hospital staff, governors, parents and external advisors will be recommending a design to the Trust Board in February 2012. Any comments that you make will be taken into consideration by the panel.

You are welcome to post comments on the Trust’s website or CLOAKING or by letter to Linda Towers, Patient Advice and Liaison Service, Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TH

Please spare a few minutes to tell us how you think Sheffield LINk is doing. All members and key stakeholders have been sent a questionnaire to complete by Monday January 30.

It should only take 5minutes to complete and gives you the opportunity to comment on all area of LINk work including communication, member support, representation and events. We are hoping for a good response to help guide our work during the time LINk has remaining.

The findings will be analysed and reported back in our Bulletin and on this website. If you've not yet taken part and would like to, please click here to open the LINk survey.

Sheffield LINk's enter and view visits to Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust premises are featured in their latest patient experience report (pages 33-34). This edition focuses on the recommendations that followed the visit to Huntsman 6 ward at the Northern General Hospital in March 2011 and the subsequent actions. The next edition will feature the visit to Accident & Emergency.

The whole report, which covers the period April 1 to June 30 last year is packed with information on all areas of the patient experient in the Trust's hospitals including results of surveys and patient feedback, new developments, hygience levels, complaints and the work of the LINk.

When we designed this website we tried to make it as easy to navigate and intuitive as possible. Inevitably, over time new items arise that don't fit neatly into the original plan and they can end up being difficult to find. While a big updating exercise is planned for the website over the next couple of months, it seemed useful to put a quick summary of where to find documents that you may be interested in.

Reports from enter and view visits - located under activities/enter & view visits (27 reports)

Reports from external meetings attended by LINk representatives - located under useful information/Reports on external meetings (more than 120 reports )

Minutes from Governing Board & LINk Steering Committee meetings - located under useful information/LINk documents

Minutes from Action Group meetings - located under useful information/LINk documents

Report from the Open Space event in October 2011 - located under useful information/LINk documents

The final Bulletin of 2011 is packed full of information and news about Sheffield LINk and local health and social care. It includes:

• information on our January Discussion Forum, which is all about HealthWatch
• an opportunity to train as a LINk authorised representative
• an update on the provision of NHS dentists in Sheffield
• news about the cut to part of the Disability Living Allowance
• a research project into therapy being run by the University of Sheffield
• a report on November's Discussion Forum on end-of-life care and the Yorkshire Ambulance Service.

Click here to see previous editions of Sheffield LINk's Bulletin.

Sheffield LINk has sent in a response to the Department of Health's consultation on future care. It is entitled Caring for our Future: shared ambitions for care and support. It aims to gather the views of  people who use care and support services, carers, local councils, care providers, and the voluntary sector about priorities for improving care and support and is due to close on 2 December.

It covers 6 areas including priorities for promoting increased personalisation and choice, how to ensure services are better integrated around people's needs, options for improving prevention and early interventiion and the role the financial services market could play in supporting users, carers and their families.

A total of 27 LINk members contributed to LINk's Caring for our Future response document. This 11-page document  was also send with a covering letter from the LINk's Chair to Sheffield City Council, NHS Sheffield and local MPs.

Issue 30 of the 'new-look' LINk Bulletin was published today.  November's edition has four pages packed with news from health and social care in Sheffield and features:

• an update on the cost of calls to GP practices
• news of more LINK Discussion Forums in December and January
• a short report on our 'request for information' to GPs about how they support patients with a sensory impairment
• how the Northern General Hospital fared when inspectors looked at dignity and nutrition standards in 2 wards for older people
• news of the consultation on an award for excellence in social care.

Click here to see previous Bulletins.

LINk continues to get calls from people about the cost of calling their GP practice on 0844 or 0845 numbers. We have continued to follow this up with NHS Sheffield who tell us that “all practices in Sheffield now either have a 0114 number or a Call Back Policy in place”.

Sheffield currently has 88 GP practices spread across 114 sites and LINk has discovered that 32 practices now have an 0114 number (open a list of practices and their numbers) including Page Hall Medical Centre, which is changing its number on December 1st.

The remaining practices have made sure that calls to 084 numbers will cost the same as any call to an 0114 number when using a BT landline only.  These practices will also call anyone back who is using a non-geographic number, such as a mobile phone or landline from other providers such as sky/Virgin media etc . Please be aware that when you ask for a call back, the practice will ask the number you are calling on to check that you are actually paying a higher rate. Practices should also be actively promoting their call costs and call-back service to their patients. Each practice should also be reviewing their phone policy every 3 months.

Some of the issues you have been reporting to LINk recently have been around the time it takes to get through to your practice in the first place and the cost of being in a queue. We raised this with NHS Sheffield but this is an issue for the individual practice and the system it uses.

However, LINk keeps a log of all issues reported to us and once we have several the same, we can investigate a particular practice. Therefore, please contact us and let us have your stories on this.