Working in Partnership with Expert Patients Programme CIC

The Expert Patients Programme CIC has many examples of working in partnership with health service and social care providers across the UK:

Co-creating Health

Co-creating Health (CCHi) is a three year demonstration programme funded by the Health Foundation. It takes a whole system approach involving self-management skills development for clinicians, self-management programmes for people living with COPD, Diabetes, Depression, Musculo-skeletal pain and a service improvement programme. The whole programme is being evaluated by Coventry University.

Co-creating Health is active in eight NHS sites across the UK. The Expert Patients Programme CIC developed and are supporting delivery of the self-management programme for Co-creating Health. CCHi self-management programmes are condition-specific and contain medical information in addition to generic self-management skills, and are delivered in equal partnership by clinical and lay tutors.

For further information please visit www.health.org.uk/cch

Caring with Confidence

Caring with Confidence is a free to the participant, knowledge and skills based programme for unpaid carers in England over the age of 18. Topics covered include financial resources, day-to-day caring and coping with the caring role.

The programme, which was initially funded by the Department of Health, helps carers make a positive difference to their life and that of the person they care for. Carers can access the programme by attending local group face-to-face sessions, completing self-study workbooks, through online sessions or a mix of all three.

Group delivery can be run in locations across the country by local providers who have the knowledge of their area and their carer demographic. Carers choosing self-study workbooks or online sessions also have the option of support from mentors but can work through the sessions at their own pace and at a time convenient to them. 

For further information please email

Commissioning Expert Patients Programme in Suffolk

by Julie Collier (Lead for Commissioning and Development - Cancer and Palliative and End of Life) and Jane Garnett (Service Delivery and Contract Manager) - NHS Suffolk

The pilot phase

NHS Suffolk has been involved with the Expert Patients Programme (EPP) since the very beginning when it was a NHS managed programme. We became interested in EPP following a workshop held in East Suffolk several years ago and decided it was something we would like to implement in our area.

We developed a detailed action plan relating to how we were going to implement EPP and raise awareness of benefits for our finance and senior management team. We did this through a needs assessment and proposal. Meanwhile we ran some pilots with funding from various streams (the Anglia Stroke and Heart Network funded a course and we got some funding through Public Health). The outcomes of the attendances were fed into the commissioning process and we achieved an outcome which gave us £40k for 08/09. A specification was developed, agreed and then formally processed through contract negotiations.

We piloted a couple of generic courses with specific aspects relating to cardiac and diabetes diseases however these were not well attended so we decided to go back to the generic course. We also commissioned the Looking after Me course for carers and ran it alongside the generic course to enable carers and the cared for to attend.

Positive outcomes

As a primary care trust (PCT) we are confident that the EPP is positively affecting individuals that attend the course; however these are currently small numbers so it is hard to accurately identify the positive impact across the PCT. Currently we have no evidence of the cost-effectiveness of this service; however with the monitoring being put in place we hope that this will be easier to demonstrate in the future.

heiQ

Under the new contract with EPP CIC we have agreed to use the Health Education Impact Questionnaire (heiQ) which is designed to measure the effectiveness of health education programmes. We hope it will show the positive and individual outcomes for course participants. EPP CIC have also added their own questions to this survey around visits to healthcare professionals which will hopefully show a reduction in the number of required healthcare interventions.

We have always been happy with the service provided by EPP CIC in our region and would recommend it to colleagues in PCTs in the East of England. We believe that the next set of courses will provide further evidence to back up this recommendation.

Julie Collier (Lead for Commissioning and Development - Cancer and Palliative and End of Life) & Jane Garnett (Service Delivery and Contract Manager) – NHS Suffolk

For more information please call the Expert Patient Programme CIC on Freephone 0800 988 5550 or contact us by email