Managers and commissioners in health and social care

Our approach is evidenced based, individualised and offers a bespoke approach to workforce training needs.

Bridges has worked with more than 100 teams across health and social care; we have experience of facilitating transformational change in how teams and services support self-management. We facilitate teams to integrate effective self-management support into care and rehabilitation of individuals with some of the most complex and multiple needs.

We aim to address each of the key recommendations made in this Health Foundation report.

Our work involves

• Enabling self-management support to be tailored to the individual needs of patients, by using our co-produced resources and tools and bespoke training for health and social care teams.
• Working with organisations to develop processes to monitor and evaluate the impact of self-management on patients and families.
• Reviewing organisational processes and methods of measuring impact, and supporting teams to develop impact questions which be used alone or added to existing satisfaction surveys. These impact questions enable teams to find out if beneficiaries are gaining from Bridges in the way in which it is intended; for example, asking the extent to which patients feel confident to self-manage, feel in control of their rehabilitation and in need of further support.
• Helping teams and services to demonstrate how they can impact self-management support across local populations with long-term conditions and disseminate key messages concerning the efficiency and effectiveness of their team, thus supporting future commissioning decisions.

Who has commissioned Bridges to address self-management in their service?

Moira Ford, Foundation Board Lead for Your Healthcare CIC
We are currently working with Community Provider Your Healthcare CIC in Kingston, London, on a workforce wide project to develop bespoke training and self-management resources.

“As a Community Interest Company, we continually strive to innovate for the benefit of all our service users. Co-production and working in partnership is at the heart of all we do, to help us provide the best possible health and social care provision locally.

Working with fellow social enterprise ‘Bridges’, we have jointly developed with service users, a self-management support package for those living in the community who either have, or care for someone who has, a long term condition.

The output of this has been approach, which includes an easy to follow booklet using their stories, tips and strategies, is already having a positive impact, helping others to take control and manage living with their condition. It’s early days but we’ve been more than delighted at the benefits seen so far from the Bridges Self- Management programme.

We’re delighted to have commissioned an organisation who clearly shares our philosophy in delivering excellent quality services and for really effective partnership working.”

“The training has given staff a greater understanding of the principles of self-efficacy. It also offered very practical solutions on how to best interact with their clients to promote this. Staff have reported changes in their communication styles and feel that goal setting is more patient-led. While staff do not feel that it has changed the outcome of the therapy intervention, they felt goals were achieved more quickly with fewer therapy sessions required and individuals had more ownership of the therapy intervention.”

“Although the terminology was frequently quoted within the service and there was certainly good intention of supporting self-management, I wasn’t convinced that staff fully understood what it entailed. Patient feedback had always been very good about the service, but hearing how disillusioned some patients felt once moving on from intensive periods of specialist rehabilitation into generic services, confirmed that things had to change. Training was required to equip the staff with the skills required to support self-management and change the culture and processes within the service. Bridges provided the team with strategies and a framework to enable this to happen.”