Health services on the Island are set to receive nearly £59 million — as the Better Care Fund is renewed for another year.
Approved at a meeting of the Isle of Wight Health and Wellbeing Board today (Thursday), the Better Care fund will now run into 2020, after it was initially supposed to end this year.
Integrated care partnership
Jointly funded by the Isle of Wight’s NHS Care Commissioning Group (CCG) and the Isle of Wight Council, the money will provide an integrated care partnership, allowing for provisions such as assistive technology to be continued.
Called one of the most ‘ambitious programmes ever introduced across the NHS and local government’, £6.4 billion nationally will be put forward in the Better Care Fund by local authorities and CCG’s to help adult social care services.
What it will fund
Nearly £59 million will be pooled together — £38,035,448 from the CCG and £20,952,051 by the Council — from the Disabled Facilities and Winter Pressures Grant to fund residential placements (£7,019,444), community-based programmes (£16,097,856) and carers services (£383,156) among others.
Tozer: There to encourage and enable integration
Dr Carol Tozer, director of adult social care at the council, said it is not spending money it did not have, reassuring the board that previous problems — that meant it wasn’t able to sign off on finances for 2016/17 — ‘was not somewhere we need to go back on’.
She said:
“We have worked on this together. It sets out what we are seeking to do under the Island Health Care Plan.
“The Better Care Fund is there to do fundamentally one thing — encourage and enable integration across health and social care, most particularly for the most vulnerable people within our local authority area.”
Smith: Review in coming months
Alison Smith, managing director of the CCG, said:
“We have got some work to do. We are going to do a couple of reviews in the coming months; how are we using that money? How are we seeing demonstrative benefits in the scheme that have been put in place to demonstrate we are working well together?
“It will help us to see what we can take forward into the coming year.”
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