Personalised Care roles in Newham
Personalisation is a key driver to how we work with patients and three roles in particular are designed to work holistically to address what matters most to patients. NHC has a team of 18 social prescribing link workers, health and wellbeing coaches and care coordinators who together make up the organisation’s personalisation team, working in GP practices across the borough, alongside other personalisation colleagues employed by directly by PCN’s.
Social prescribing link workers connect patients with a range of non-medical services to support their social and wellbeing needs. Doctors might refer someone who has challenges around debt, or loneliness, or needs to address complex social needs. Perhaps they have issues around long-term health conditions and need support to access community-based activities or services. Working to a plan and a set of goals the patient has identified, social prescribing is way of discovering new ways to address your wellbeing goals and identify strengths.
Health and wellbeing coaches as the name suggests work with people who want to improve their fitness, address weight concerns and understand how to better look after their health. They are experts on behaviour change and motivation and. If you want to increase your activity levels or better understand how to improve your life while living with diabetes or cardiovascular disease, these are the people to speak to.
Care coordinators roles vary but on the whole the approach is to have a specialist who can identify people with complex health or care issues who can then support them to navigate sometimes confusing health pathways, to make the most from each appointment and better understand those conversations. Care coordinators will check in with you to make sure that you’ve understood what has been discussed and that you’re ready for the next conversation.
Over the last year we have worked closely with the Public Health Team to develop the directory of services for our team which was recently made available to residents as the Well Newham Directory. Supporting Public Health at the Well Newham launch last June, many of our team came along to meet residents alongside our PCN colleagues to tell them about our personalisation roles and the directory which is a vast resource of all the community organisations we work with to support patients in reaching their health and wellbeing goals.
