The Healthy Living Community - About-Us - Upstream

The Healthy Living Community 

The ‘Healthy Living Community’ and the integration of the voluntary sector within GP-based multi-disciplinary teams was initiated by Upstream in co-operation with other voluntary sector organisations in Mid Devon and Exeter and underlies the approach of Devon’s ‘Link Age Plus’ project and ‘Partnerships for Older Peoples’ Projects’.

The Healthy Living Community is: 

• a consortium of voluntary sector organisations in an identifiable area (e.g. based on one of Devon’s 28 market and coastal town areas); with quality assurance, good governance and performance management monitoring;
  
• working together with the statutory authorities to co-ordinate services and signpost people according to individual choice and need; focusing on the widest determinants of health, early intervention, the long-term maintenance of good health, promoting self-care, self-sustainability and independence.

The Healthy Living Community will:

• be represented on fully-integrated GP multi-disciplinary teams, providing a co-ordinated referral route to services in the community and referral back to the multi-disciplinary team as necessary;
  
• provide a single gateway for the interchange of information, working with ‘My Devon’ Customer Service Centre to enable people to understand and use information, make choices and audit services;

For the voluntary sector, the Healthy Living Community will:

• encourage increased capacity in the voluntary sector to meet demand, identify gaps in provision, and contract with the statutory sector;
  
• prompt health and social care professionals to have greater confidence, and understanding of, community services.

For the statutory sector, the Healthy Living Community will:

• reduce the burden on the statutory sector and GP practices, enabling the devolution of appropriate levels of care, backed by monitoring in the community to control any costly spiral of decline;
  
• provide a seamless progression from a higher level of professional intervention to a supportive level of community intervention; facilitating inter-agency working across all aspects of the widest possible determinants of health.

For the community itself, the Healthy Living Community will:

• provide people with the opportunity to determine their own health and lifestyle choices and to control the means of delivery and the range of services on offer;
  
• cascade the health-training programme into the community itself through self-sustaining community groups as well as supported groups