Achieving high-quality care for people with complex needs

Age-related chronic conditions absorb the largest, and growing, share of health care budgets. To address this, strategies of care co-ordination are needed to promote more cost-effective care through streamlining services. This conference explored how to co-ordinate care for people with complex chronic conditions and frail older people.

You can watch the speaker presentations below or download the presentations from the presentations tab above.

Presentations and talks from this conference

• Pippa Gough: what is the right kind of care and support?

Pippa Gough gives her perspective on the care her parents have received, what good care looks like, and how and why care varies across the health service.

• David Oliver: making services fit for an ageing population

David Oliver, National Clinical Director for Older People at the Department of Health, discusses population ageing and attitudes to it, what older people and carers want and the solutions to providing better care.

• Jill Maben: exploring the links between staff wellbeing and patients' experience of care

Jill Maben, Director of the National Nursing Research Unit at King’s College London, highlights the findings of her study into the relationship between staff wellbeing and patient experience.

• Ruth Poole: were you proud?

Ruth Poole, Group Clinical Director at Healthcare at Home, looks at why an engaged and supported workforce supports patient choice and control at home.

• Care co-ordination demonstrator site: Greenwich and Bexley Advanced Dementia Services

Dr Adrian Treloar explains how Greenwich and Bexley Advanced Dementia Services provide holistic and palliative care at home for people with advanced dementia.

• Care co-ordination demonstrator site: Midhurst Macmillan Service

Jo Stuttaford and Sue Dewar share how Midhurst Macmillan Service provides palliative care in the community via a consultant-led multi disciplinary team.

• Care co-ordination demonstrator site: Pembrokeshire – Community Care Closer to Home

Angela Watwood shares how care is delivered closer to home and how the approach has helped avoid hospital admissions and reduce numbers entering long-term residential care.

• Care co-ordination demonstrator site: Sandwell Integrated Primary Care Mental Health and Wellbeing Service

Lisa Hill tells us more about Sandwell's integrated community service. The service uses care co-ordinators who work with individuals with a range of complex needs to help them navigate and access a wide variety of primary care-based mental health and wellbeing services.

• Care co-ordination demonstrator site: South Devon and Torbay

Solveig Sansom explains more about South Devon and Torbay's predictive model and virtual ward.

More about this conference

In November 2011, The King's Fund invited academics, practitioners, policy-makers and representatives from patient and voluntary organisations to discuss the care of very old frail people with complex health problems. The Sir Roger Bannister Health Summit, which took place at Leeds Castle, focused on what needs to be done to build the confidence of vulnerable older patients with complex needs and their carers in the quality of care in hospital and at home.

The King's Fund is also currently undertaking a UK-based comparison of successful innovative care co-ordination programmes, funded by the Aetna Foundation. This project: aims to understand the key components of effective care co-ordination and the barriers and facilitators of successful implementation.

This conference brought these important pieces of work together and provided a platform for the continued discussion on how the health system can be developed to ensure that people with complex needs and conditions, especially frail older people, can be assured of receiving only high-quality care. It also acted as a platform to announce the successful case study sites for the Aetna Foundation research.