Working together for a healthier borough

Michele Bennion, Kathryn Andrew, Elaine Stone, Mayor Carol Wardle, Janice Maslen, Linda Fisher, Wendy Meston, Keith Walker

Nearly 200 people, including the Mayor of Rochdale, attended a special event on 2 July to celebrate quality health and social care and partnership working across the borough.

Organised by HMR Community Services (part of Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust) the event aimed to celebrate quality, showcase partnership working and highlight plans to integrated services.

HMR Community Services is working hard to transform services, so they continue to meet people’s needs in the future and are joined up with other NHS services, along with those provided by the local authority, third sector and other partner organisations. This will help to improve people’s health and wellbeing and help to ensure they can avoid being admitted to hospital unnecessarily.

This work has resulted in many innovative partnership projects, which are delivering benefits for both service users and staff, and were showcased during the event. This included:

• Assistive Technology partnership: Demonstrating how a joint partnership offering systems of both telehealth and telecare will support individuals to monitor their health condition and remain safe at home. Telehealth enables people with a long-term condition to monitor their own vital signs e.g. blood pressure or oxygen levels. Telecare monitors people’s activity levels, including how many times they get up in the night and if they experience any falls, reminds people to take their medication and much more.
• Paris demonstration: This is an electronic patient record system that will help to streamline processes, improve the quality of patient information available, and reduce paperwork

Speaking about the event, the Mayor of Rochdale Carol Wardle said: “I'm very pleased to have attended such a brilliant and well-thought-out event. It was enlightening to see how a wide range of services across the borough are working together to provide better quality care for local people.

"From speaking to staff at the event, I feel I have a better understanding of health services in the area and I look forward to seeing services continuing to work in partnership to keep people out of hospital and in their own homes."

Michele Bennion, HMR Community Services Director, added: “The event was well attended and the feedback has been very positive. I’m delighted that the event was so successful.

“Many attendees said they felt they came away from the event with a better understanding of local health and social care services, the challenges we are facing and how we are all working together to overcome these and ensure we can continue to deliver high quality services into the future.

“I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who arranged and attended the event.”