Have you heard about our new digital volunteering platform yet? You can register your organisation and opportunities now ready for launch to volunteers in January!
Voluntary Centre Services (VCS) alongside Lincolnshire Community and Voluntary Service (LCVS) and Lincolnshire Voluntary Engagement Team (LVET) and our digital partner Team Kinetic, is launching the Lincolnshire Volunteers Programme (LVP); a new digital platform supporting volunteering across the county.
If you are currently advertising opportunities through LCVS and/or VCS you will need to register your organisation and opportunities onto the new platform as it will become the primary way that LCVS and VCS advertise volunteering opportunities across the county. You will only need to register once even if your organisation covers both VCS and LCVS areas. The platform is completely free for volunteer-involving organisations to use.
We are here to support you with the registration process. If you need any help to register your organisation and opportunities or have any questions, please contact Abbi Taylor: abbi@voluntarycentreservices.org.uk
Further information on the Lincolnshire Volunteers Programme:
As well as helping Lincolnshire to be a county where community matters, with volunteering at its heart and where everybody’s contribution is valuable the Lincolnshire Volunteers Programme will help:
People to contribute to society, gain a sense of purpose or lead to employment through providing access to a wide range of volunteering opportunities
Organisations provide a positive and supportive volunteer experience that is flexible to new initiatives and challenges
Increase access to a range of volunteering opportunities and attract new volunteers
Create supportive relationships, reconnecting people into their local communities and overcoming loneliness and social isolation
Organisations across Lincolnshire will be able to use the Lincolnshire Volunteers Programme to advertise their volunteering opportunities for free across the county, along with several other benefits:
their own public profile page within the platform, linking to their opportunities
the ability to self-manage opportunities and their content
the ability to self-manage their profile information
a volunteer management space
reporting and analysis of any volunteering activity linked to that organisation
Lincolnshire County Council is coordinating a submission to the Department of Health and Social Care’s Accelerating Reform Fund.
They already have some ideas submitted by voluntary organisations and from care providers. For example: Wraparound support for people when they go home from hospital; a deep clean and maintenance service; a review and redesign of the Carers Emergency Response Service; an approach to carers for people with Learning Disabilities as they age, an expansion of information and advice services; or an extension of the Trusted Assessor system.
Can you add value to the suggestions? Do you have ideas of your own that would speed up or scale the adoption of innovative practice? Or that will build capacity in adult social care in Lincolnshire?
At this point all that is needed is a high level outline describing the idea, the outcomes you hope to achieve, the challenges you might face, what you will measure to prove its impact and what teh overall impact will be.
Your ideas should meet one of the 12 priorities set by the Minister of State for Care:
Priority 1: community-based care models such as shared living arrangements
Priority 2: supporting people to have greater control over their care options, such as by using digital tools to self-direct support or communicate needs and preferences
Priority 3: investment in local area networks or communities to support prevention and promote wellbeing, enabling people to age well in their communities
Priority 4 (focusses on unpaid carers): ways to support unpaid carers to have breaks which are tailored to their needs
Priority 5: digital tools to support workforce recruitment and retention, for example through referral schemes
Priority 6: develop and expand the impact of local volunteer-supported pathways for people drawing on care and support
Priority 7 (focusses on unpaid carers): ways to conduct effective carer’s assessments with a focus on measuring outcomes and collaboration
Priority 8 (focusses on unpaid carers): services that reach out to, and involve, unpaid carers through the discharge process
Priority 9: digital workforce development and market shaping tools with capability to map, strengthen and grow local workforce capacity relative to system demand
Priority 10: social prescribing to connect people with information, advice, activities and services in the community
Priority 11 (focusses on unpaid carers): ways to better identify unpaid carers in local areas
Priority 12 (focusses on unpaid carers): ways to encourage people to recognise themselves as carers and promote access to carer services.
Join Lincolnshire Community Adult Mental Health Transformation for the second in a series of webinars.
The series is designed to empower health professionals, and mental health advocates, with the knowledge and tools they need to be part of the paradigm shift in the world of mental health care.
In this session, the Community Connectors will talk about the practicalities of community-driven mental health transformation. Discover more about local initiatives and how they support people through the festive season.
Join us to be inspired by transformative grassroots efforts in your community.
Details of the webinar is below.
Topic: Our Communities
Date: December 12, 2023 Time: 12:30-13:20 (50 mins)
This food summit aims to bring together Foodbanks, Community Groceries and organisations offering Food Support across Greater Lincolnshire to share ideas, best practice and develop solutions.
Thursday 23rd November 2023, 9:30am-4pm
New Life Centre, Mareham Lane, Sleaford, NG34 7JP
Tea & Coffee from 9.00am. Lunch provided
As we all face the difficulty of sourcing food and supporting our communities we hope to support each other in finding solutions and collaborating.
The day will focus on four key areas:
Increasing Dignity
Community Groceries, Cafes and other socially inclusive models
The day is free to attend for anyone in Greater Lincolnshire involved in emergency and community food support, and includes refreshments. Booking essential.
Free parking – we encourage attendees to travel together. If anyone is struggling with transport please contact: laura@lincolnshirefoodpartnership.org
This event is being organised by Lincolnshire Food Partnership with support from New Life Centre Sleaford, Lincolnshire Co-op and Acts Trust, Lincoln
The below is taken from the foreward of the Summary. Please follow the links for the full article.
This year has been a turbulent one for health and social care.
In addition to the ongoing problem of ‘gridlocked’ care highlighted in last year’s State of Care, the cost of living crisis is biting harder for the public, staff, and providers – and workforce pressures have escalated. This combination increases the risk of unfair care – where those who can afford to pay for treatment do so, and those who can’t face longer waits and reduced access.
Adult social care providers are facing increased running costs, including food and electricity, with some struggling to pay their staff a wage in line with inflation, which affects recruitment and retention. This is likely to have an impact on people, both in the quality of care they receive and in providers’ ability to re-invest in care homes – data from our Market Oversight scheme shows that care home profitability remains at historically low levels.
Local authority budgets have failed to keep pace with rising costs and the increase in the number of people needing care. As adult social care places funded by a local authority are often less profitable, there is the risk that people who live in more deprived areas, and are more likely to receive local authority-funded care, may not be able to get the care they need.
Some people who pay for their own care at home have had to cut back on visits to support their basic needs. One homecare provider told us that, due to the cost of living crisis and increased fuel prices, it had to increase the rates charged. Because of this, some people had to reduce their care visits to a minimum, which had an impact on their quality of life.
Workforce pressures, already a huge challenge, have further intensified, with ongoing industrial action by NHS staff unhappy with pay and conditions. The number of people on waiting lists for treatment has grown to record figures and in the face of longer waits, those who can afford it are increasingly turning to private healthcare. Research from YouGov shows that 8 in 10 of those who used private health care last year would previously have used the NHS, with separate research showing that 56% of people had tried to use the NHS before using private healthcare.
The danger is that the combination of the cost of living crisis and workforce challenges exacerbate existing heath inequalities, increasing the risk of a two-tier system of health care. People who cannot afford to pay could end up waiting longer for care while their health deteriorates. Our adult inpatient survey, based on feedback from over 63,000 people, found that 41% felt their health deteriorated while they were on a waiting list to be admitted to hospital.
People may also be forced to make difficult financial choices. We heard from someone who receives benefits who resorted to extracting their own tooth because they were unable to find an NHS dentist. They then had to pay £1,200 on a credit card for private treatment, doing without household essentials until the debt was paid.
While the publication of the NHS Long Term Workforce plan has been a positive step in addressing workforce pressures, implementation will be challenging – particularly without a social care workforce strategy to sit alongside it. We continue to call for a national workforce strategy that raises the status of the adult social care workforce and ensures that career progression, pay and rewards attract and retain the right professional staff in the right numbers. It is encouraging that Skills for Care has made this an area of focus.
In our inspection activity, we have continued to take a risk-based approach this year, focusing our inspection activity on those core services that, nationally, are operating with an increased level of risk, and on individual providers where our monitoring identifies safety concerns. Ratings data shows a mixed picture of quality, with a notable decline in mental health and ambulance services.
We have continued our focused programme of maternity inspections, with the overarching picture emerging of a service and staff under huge pressure. Ten per cent of maternity services are rated as inadequate overall, while 39% are rated as requires improvement. Safety and leadership remain particular areas of concern, with 15% of services rated as inadequate for their safety and 12% rated as inadequate for being well-led.
While it has been encouraging that all maternity units inspected so far have adjusted the level of consultant cover to meet recommendations made in the Ockenden report, the cover model is often fragile, with rotas relying on every consultant being available. We have seen examples of services taking action to manage staff shortages safely – but we have also seen issues with governance and lack of oversight from trust boards, delays to care and lack of one-to-one care during labour, as well as poor communication with women and difficult working relationships between staff groups.
Alongside our programme of maternity inspections, we have commissioned a series of interviews with midwives from ethnic minority groups to explore their experiences of working in maternity services and their insights into safety issues. A common theme from these interviews was that care for people using maternity services is affected by racial stereotypes and a lack of cultural awareness among staff. One midwife told us; “The NHS is amazing, but it was built by white people for white people. We need to adapt, because now we have a diverse population and workforce.
Access to and quality of mental health care also remain key areas of concern, with gaps in community care continuing to put pressure on mental health inpatient services and many inpatient services struggling to provide beds. This, in turn, is leading to people being cared for in inappropriate environments – often in emergency departments. One acute trust told us that there had been 42 mental health patients waiting for over 36 hours in the emergency department in one month alone. When people do get a bed in a mental health hospital, the quality of care is often not good enough. Safety continues to be an area of concern, with 40% of providers rated as requires improvement or inadequate for safety.
Recruitment and retention of staff remains one of the biggest challenges for the mental health sector, with the use of bank and agency staff remaining high and almost 1 in 5 mental health nursing posts vacant. We’ve raised concerns that staffing issues in mental health services are leading to the over-use of restrictive practices, and we’ve worked with our expert advisory group for autistic people and people with a learning disability to develop a clearer and stronger position on these practices, including restraint, seclusion, and segregation. We expect all providers of health and social care to recognise restrictive practice and to actively work to reduce its use.
Many of the challenges described in this year’s State of Care are to some degree caused by a lack of joined-up planning, investment, and delivery of care. Integrated care systems present the opportunity of bringing together local health and care leaders with the populations they support to understand, plan, and deliver care at a local level. This would, in time, move some of the focus of care away from big institutions and towards local and self-care provision, with autonomy to act on the needs of a local population and an increased focus on preventing poor health – not just treating it.
However, in our first look across local care systems, we found that while all systems have some equality and health inequalities objectives, not all these plans have timeframes and measures. All systems need clear and realistic goals, and support to achieve these, that reflect how they will address unwarranted variations in population health and disparities in access, outcomes, and experience of health and social care.
This opportunity must be grasped to ensure fairer care for everyone – so people get the care they need, not just the care they can afford.
