Reflecting on a busy 2017 and looking ahead to 2018

Hello,

We can hardly believe it’s almost Christmas and we fully recognise that it’s time for a well-earned break to recharge and have some downtime.

Yesterday we held the last of this year’s regular weekly meetings with cabinet members. We approved the launch of a new homelessness campaign; called ‘Real Change Wiltshire’. The campaign aims to raise awareness that not all beggars are homeless and that more useful and sustainable help can be given through charities and outreach workers – rather than donating cash on the street.

It also aims to make sure that those people that can help a rough sleeper and provide the support that they need are better publicised so that members of the public can contact them directly; particularly at this time of the year when the temperatures drop and its Christmas.

We think this is a really positive campaign – and launching it at this time of year, when life can be really tough for some, is the right time.

We also discussed with cabinet the budget meetings held last week with all of the directors to further discuss plans to find £30m of savings in 2018-19. The good news is we’re continuing to reduce the gap, but there is more work to be done to agree the timings of some of the proposed saving and how they will be implemented. This will enable us to ascertain whether we can achieve a full year savings from the proposals or a partial saving.

We are still awaiting the funding announcement from Government, which is expected this week - once we have this we can assess our current position and the savings required. We will update on this in the New Year. 

At yesterday’s corporate leadership team meeting we discussed the recent notice from the Care Quality Commission informing us that there will be a review of the whole system of health and social care in Wiltshire early next year. This will be a wide-ranging and thorough review which will impact not just on us, but also our key partners in the clinical commissioning group, our three acute hospital trusts, and Wiltshire Health and Care, the partnership focused on delivering improved community services and enabling people to live independent lives for as long as possible.

Local system reviews look at how people move between health and social care, examining how delayed transfers of care occur and how these are managed, with a particular focus on people over 65 years old. The review will also include an assessment of commissioning across health and social care and the governance systems and processes in place in respect of the management of resources.

As always with this kind of scrutiny, we know that the review will look at what is working well but what is really important is that it highlights areas for improvements. This is critical for us in terms of how we make the integration of health and social care a reality. Clearly there will be a lot of work to be done to prepare for this and we will update you further when we have more information.

You can see our latest highlights presentation on the intranet.

Finally, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. It’s been another really busy year and we’ve achieved a great deal as an organisation which is down to your hard work and contribution.

Our thanks go to those of you who will be working or on call over the festive period. Hopefully you will all have a chance to unwind and have a well-earned rest at some point.

We are all looking forward to 2018 and an exciting year of opportunity and delivery.

Alistair, Carlton and Terence