Job purpose

South Bristol Locality Partnership is one of six place-based Locality Partnerships within the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) Integrated Care System (ICS).  Locality Partnerships work at a local level with their communities to improve wellbeing & health.  Each Locality Partnership focuses on a given area and population and designs services that fit in with people’s lives.  Locality Partnerships are made up of local health, social care and local, plus wider, voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations. Together they seek to work as one team to understand what matters most to their local community.  They then share their expertise, experiences, and knowledge to improve services for their population and try to ensure people are at the heart of every decision.  The new way of working together allows health, care and VCS professionals to collaborate, align and integrate approaches and services.

There is now wide acceptance that one of the key priorities facing health & care systems is to support the development of much stronger, more resilient and better-connected communities.  A key aspect of this will be to facilitate far closer and more productive relationships between statutory providers, local VCS organisations, communities of interest, and other local people.  Initiatives such as the deployment of Link Workers or Social Prescribers and the development of Primary Care Networks (PCNs) all support this direction of travel. However, we strongly believe that there is a missing critical additional role in our local ecosystem – an individual to bridge between the PCNs and the communities in which the various GP Practices are located. 

Swift PCN - GP practices are working together with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital, and voluntary services in their local areas in groups of practices known as primary care networks (PCNs). PCNs build on existing primary care services and enable greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care for people close to home. Clinicians describe this as a change from reactively providing appointments to proactively caring for the people and communities they serve. The Swift PCN covers the central and southern area of South Bristol and includes 8 practices and serves a population of approximately 77,000 people.

What is unique about the Community Innovation & Development Lead role is that they will work at a local operational level, bringing together different stakeholders within Swift PCN. Their time will not be consumed by assessing people/ patients and then referring them to some form of community provision, into the health and/ or social care system, or handling specific cases themselves.  The role is both operational and strategic, aimed at ensuring that the different stakeholders involved in the wellbeing & health of our local communities are working effectively together.

The Community Innovation & Development Lead prepares the ground for others and ensures that other local workers (such as Social Prescribing Link Workers) don’t get overwhelmed with stakeholder management, as opposed to supporting local people.

Main duties and responsibilities

The Community Innovation & Development Lead’s role is to:

• Bridge the differences in working cultures, languages and approaches principally between the PCN (but also the wider NHS and Bristol City Council (BCC) Social Care) and the voluntary and community sector (VCS).  This will help build relationships as well as an understanding of the needs and potential for all parties, in order to help make working together easier.  The role recognises and leverages the expertise and potential of all parties.
• Bring an in-depth understanding of the local VCS landscape, as well as communities of interest, into the GP surgeries; (from here the use of ‘GP surgery’ will also mean the plural) and vice versa.
• Bring a good working knowledge of the huge variety of VCS activities taking place in each GP surgery location and have the time to stay up to date (using whatever systems exist or are developed).
• Have the time to make connections with local (and wider) VCS organisations, services, activities.
• Develop a strategic network of contacts to be informed of, and influence, NHS, ICB, BCC, VCS and other agendas that affect the local communities (with a wellbeing & health focus).
• Represent the GP surgery/PCN/s and community health issues on key strategic groups.
• GPs are under great pressure to deliver against the new PCN contract – with a large number of service specifications to try and implement.  The Community Innovation & Development Lead can act as the conduit between community services, people/ patients and the GP, or primary care system, at a PCN level and across the three PCNs in South Bristol.  This role can have the time to build and nurture relationships, plus create the trust that will release the capacity in the VCS and local communities and make it a far more integrated (recognised and valued) part of the local wellbeing & health offer.
• Identify potential funding (locally and nationally) to support innovative local wellbeing & health initiatives and, where appropriate, facilitate co-produced (with local people), multi-agency (including VCS organisations) applications.
• Be the liaison between the GP surgery and local VCS organisations to align the support and capacity building of local community assets to support community wellbeing & health (e.g. volunteering, local organisations, PPGs, etc).
• Where possible, advocate for, and support, the development of VCS community businesses that work within the local wellbeing & health ecology/ economy in order to enable sustainability, the local cycling of money, as well as their ability to work more with (ill-health) prevention and early intervention.

Person Specification - Supporting Evidence

In the supporting evidence of your application form, you must demonstrate your experiences by giving specific examples for the criteria within the person specification. 

Recent experience within a VCS organisation:

• Preferably from the local VCS (involved in Community Development).
• Preferably knows the local South Bristol area (key issues, organisations, etc).
• Has a good understanding of the local Health & Social Care sectors.
• Great networker.
• Able to communicate at all levels.
• Strategic thinker, influencer, enabler and facilitator.

What outcomes are expected to be achieved?

• Reduced inappropriate patient presentations at the PCN/s GP surgery.
• Improved individual self-care and community supported self-care which will improve community wellbeing & health.
• Reduced demand on primary and secondary Health Care, plus Social Care services.
• Bridging - building relationships, understanding and learning between the GP surgery staff and local and wider VCS staff.
• Asset mapping and forming connections with the local community (people) and VCS that add value and impact to the work of the PCN surgeries, Primary Health Care and Social Care.
• Strategic networking with NHS, Integrated Care Board, Bristol City Council, Volunatary and Community Sector and others that results in more awareness of initiatives, services, activities, etc and results in a more joined-up approach.
• Find resources – investment into new ways of delivering wellbeing & health care.
• Building a community offer, a community wellbeing offer, that is integrated with the NHS Health and BCC Social Care systems - especially Primary and Community Care.
• Supporting capacity building of local VCS to engage with Primary Care, BCC Social Care and other local health and care initiatives, to continue the drive to improve wellbeing & health outcomes for people (and reduce demand on primary and secondary health care).
• Identifying and building local projects and programmes that support the potential of community-led wellbeing, (e.g. the use of GP practice waiting rooms as places for people to connect and learn about community-based services, volunteering schemes, creation of local wellbeing hubs, etc) plus sustainable community businesses focused on wellbeing & health.
• Work with Health and Care bodies to use data to address health inequalities.  Pursuing preventative care to help direct available resources to achieve the greatest wellbeing & health benefits.
• A gradual evolution away from a ‘command and control’, top-down, demand-led service provision, to one where local people and the local communities are recognised as equal value stakeholders in their individual and collective wellbeing & health; where they have a real and impactful say in the creation of community-developed and community-led solutions, plus service design and implementation; co-produced with the local VCS, primary health providers and others.