Demonstrating local impact of health and wellbeing schemes will be key to securing future investment in devolution plans, says ReferAll’s Jerry Saddington.
The government wants to fundamentally rewire the way the country works by devolving more decision-making to regional and local leaders. This, it says in its Rewiring the State policy paper, will drive growth and investment while ensuring public services, including health, better respond to the priorities of people and places.
How these plans will affect our ability to deliver and improve health and wellbeing referral schemes was the focus of the recent Active Wellbeing Leadership Network in Hammersmith, London.
With a theme of ‘Rewiring the State and Devolution’, the event attracted more than 40 delegates from across the health and wellbeing sector, including ukactive, Sport England, industry suppliers as well as senior managers and leaders from councils and leisure trusts.
It was both stimulating and informative, giving delegates the opportunity to share their views, listen to others and reflect on what it will take to make these proposals work in practice.
One theme dominated discussions: data, how to collect it and how to use it.
Evidencing outcomes is vital to securing longer-term funding for referral schemes. Commissioners need to know that a service offers value for money but also makes a measurable difference to the communities it serves. That means collecting meaningful data using NICE-recommended methods and validated questionnaires, then interpreting the findings to demonstrate the impact of that service.
However, the discussions highlighted that even when good data is available, competing priorities can be a challenge. Commissioners and budget managers may recognise the value of health and wellbeing schemes, but they are often pulled in different directions when allocating limited funds for the year ahead. The argument that investing in prevention could save the NHS billions of pounds over the next 10 to 20 years is compelling, but it can carry little weight when local authorities are trying to balance next year’s budgets and ensure essential services, such as bin collection, continue to operate.
The hope is that changes to the funding model, which will give local authorities more control over how central funding is allocated, will help shift the conversation. Service providers and commissioners could have more opportunities to make their case directly to local decision-makers, using local data to show how a scheme improves health, wellbeing and physical activity in a community.
It remains to be seen whether devolution will deliver this shift, but the prospect of such a seismic shake-up of local funding, and the opportunities it could create for local facilities and health and wellbeing schemes, is attracting interest across the sector.
What’s clear is the need for robust evidence, collected consistently from a range of sources and presented in ways that help commissioners understand the impact of their investment.
Systems such as ReferAll can support this process by bringing referral and outcome data together, helping providers build a clearer picture of who their services reach, what difference they make and where there is scope to improve.
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