Consultancy

We have experience of providing bespoke consultancy packages to address the impact of supporting self-management in health and social care teams.

Our consultancy package goes beyond training, and we use our principles of co-production by working with staff at all levels to understand the service, training requirements and individual needs of clients and patients. We enable teams to deliver and sustain best practice in self-management, measure impact, increase efficiency and importantly improve the experiences of patients/clients and their families living with a long term health condition.

Our approach directly supports findings from an independent evaluation of the Health Foundation's Co-Creating Health Programme that concluded ‘to have the best chance of success there needs to be a strategic, whole-system approach to implementation of self-management support’

We do this by:

1. Upskilling the workforce across a pathway or service to be confident to integrate self-management support into everyday practice across workforce boundaries, by training mixed workforce groups (e.g. acute and community rehabilitation, integrated care, re-ablement, discharge avoidance teams).

2. Facilitating a positive impact on self-efficacy, mood, QOL and well-being of individuals living with long-term conditions. Bridges stroke self-management programme has shown to impact on clinical outcomes and can be delivered as part of usual care and rehabilitation. This affords greater access to best practice in self-management support including individuals hard to reach through traditional group programmes. Provision of self-management support becomes integral to rehabilitation/enablement interactions through key changes in communication and care provided.

3. Working with practitioners to support individuals and families to be more in control of their everyday lives and health, which has the potential to reduce repeated, short term healthcare interventions and empower individuals to be more in control of their health and well-being. Our work builds on positive findings from a recent NIHR cluster feasibility trial which showed teams using Bridges stroke self-management programme were more confident to discharge patients and patients required fewer sessions to gain the same outcomes.

Bridges has been developed following a staged approach using the MRC Framework for Complex interventions. A recent NIHR funded feasibility trial by Fiona Jones included a community neurological rehabilitation team in South London who achieved comparable outcomes to other intervention clusters (favourable changes in patient’s function and self-efficacy) but with 50% less costs. This work and additional projects have identified factors which inform the Bridges ‘whole systems approach’ to self-management which could be extended to other patients groups and this project utilises three key aspects.