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Improving The Lives Of Older People

Background

Contact & Connect is a service commissioned by the Older People’s Partnership supporting delivery of key priorities in the Coventry Older Peoples Strategy. The overall aim is to help older people live safely and independently in their homes and to improve their quality of life by easily and efficiently connecting them to appropriate support services. It was a 2 year funded project. The success of the initial project secured a further three years funding to enable the service to continue through until end March 2011.

The service is a referral hub managed by Age Concern Coventry, and delivered by a range of 10 local agencies working in partnership to connect older people to the services they say they need.

The partners are Coventry Local Pension Service, Age Concern Coventry, Orbit Care and Repair, The Carers Centre, The Primary Care Trust, Coventry City Council, Coventry & Warwickshire Community Safety Scheme, Whitefriars Housing Association, West Midlands Police and West Midlands Fire Service.

What was done?

There is a central co-ordination team of referral and outreach workers (managed by Age Concern) who refer older people within Coventry to partner agencies and other professionals for advice or to provide them with services to improve the quality of their life and ensure that they can safely continue to stay in their own homes. The aim was to refer all 3800 residents over the age of 85 as was deemed appropriate. This work has now been completed and extended to include an 85th birthday programme where all those in Coventry who turn 85 will be offered a visit from the Local Pensions Service who will refer as appropriate into Contact & Connect.

Key outcomes and impact

The anticipated outcomes of the project were as follows:

• Reduce the number of fires and injury as a result of fires for vulnerable groups, especially older people.
• High quality referrals from hard to reach. Resources can be deployed on service delivery rather than promotion and client finding.

And to date, Contact & Connect has 4,888 clients and has connected them to 10,142 services since its conception. 1,977 of these referrals have been to WMFS.

All local people in Coventry who are over 85 have been contacted by the Local Pensions Service and have been offered the service provided by Contact & Connect.

In order to assess the effectiveness of the service the University of Warwick carried out an assessment of the work that had taken place. Altogether 377 people were interviewed over the phone and 42 face to face.

The results showed that Contact & Connect has:

• enabled the 10 partner organisations to deliver a range of targeted proactive early intervention services to those most at risk
• helped most partner organisations to achieve key performance targets
• enabled easier identification and access to target clients, including those often hard to reach
• delivered more or better services to people aged 85+, including support to Social Care clients.
• provided significant and transferable learning, including supporting partners working together
• been judged to be cost effective overall for many organisations, with potential for further gains
• contributed to a greater understanding of older people’s needs to inform future commissioning
• contributed to recognition by external inspection bodies of a coordinated approach to improve the quality of life for older people in Coventry e.g. Commission for Social Care Inspection and Council’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment
• provided further opportunities to support improvement to the quality of life and promoting independence for older people in the new Local Area Agreement targets
• started to link with health services to work with and target high risk groups of older people to address missed opportunities during the first year of operation.

Some key statistics:

• 78% of HFSCs resulted in the supply and fitting of smoke alarms.
• 70% of those receiving help with fire safety said it had improved their lives quite a lot
• Older people managed to secure an additional £2.2M of welfare benefits
• 90% of Contact & Connect clients were 85+
• 65% of clients felt that the project had made a positive difference to their quality of life

A customer quote:
“They fitted smoke alarms for me and a vibrating pad under my pillow so I will be woken up if there is a fire in the night. It’s given me peace of mind and I can go to bed feeling safe.”