To receive a verbal update on winter planning.
Minutes:
Dr Will Maimaris presented the item.
The meeting heard that:
· At present time, the amount of vaccines available to community sites was quite limited. One of the borough’s sites did not have enough vaccine for the people who had been invited. The borough had two GP practice sites which were Bounds Green and Morris House. There were many more pharmacies now where people could access the vaccination. There had been a national drive to ensure that access would be available locally. Taking the vaccines out to community members was being done through Whittington health including to those who were housebound and those in care homes. The cost of the payment that the borough received for every vaccine was less than it cost to administer it. In the next few weeks, there would be greater levels of accessibility, but not everyone was on the national booking system. Therefore, the borough’s two large sites were sending out invites to everybody on GP lists in Haringey to all of those over 65 and those whore at risk. So far 40,000 individuals had been invited. More would be invited in the coming weeks.
· It was challenging to combat vaccine fatigue partly as there were fewer resources, but the Council was using its standard channels and the NHS was using its contacts with different community groups to raise awareness and increase uptake.
· In relation to primary care around winter planning, across North Central London there was the £2,000,000 that had been made available for capacity in primary care. This had been designated to primary care networks in line with their weighted list size. For Haringey, the primary care networks had received somewhere between £35,000 and £55,000 each for additional capacity. There were a range of things that were tried last year and Primary Care Networks (PCNs) had been invited to choose what they wanted to do from that range of interventions and the majority of them were going to use their resource for additional clinical capacity. Although there would be additional capacity and primary care, this would bolster the traditional capacity. The other main use of the funding was to maintain the GPs who were based at the front door of North Middlesex seeing patients who come with primary care types of conditions. North Middlesex Hospital had been funding that over the summer. The ICB would fund it for the winter.
· The ICB had managed to bring out an easy way of PCNs working on the winter access funds. Normally, these conversations would occur in November. A better system had been created and the ICB had done well to achieve this so that discussions could be held earlier. As the funding had been announced earlier in the year, this had helped with the mobilisation of activities and also the workforce required to deliver these.
· From an adult social care perspective, there were a number of workforce initiatives and programmes in place focusing on supporting hospital discharge. Teams were aligned specifically to hospital discharges with a service manager, team managers and social workers This maximised the capacity of the team as additional resource alongside the existing workforce. This helped progress the adult social care pathways in a timely way. This facilitated assessments and reviews every two to three weeks. There had been an announcement of more government funding, but this had been identified for certain challenged ICS systems and did not include Haringey.
The Chair felt that it would be useful to the work that was being done in Public Health regarding Health Champions as it would help discuss targets and support communities that had been identified through the coronavirus crisis.
RESOLVED:
That the update be noted.