June project update

As always, our team has been busy working toward important milestones in the Living Well initiative, including:

• Our first Living Well employees
  We are very pleased to report we have recently appointed two Living Well Clinical Respiratory and Heart Failure Nurse Clinicians, making them the first official employees trialling the initiative. 
  These nurse clinicians will provide clinical support and guidance during the roll out the new MLHD Respiratory and Heart Failure Model of Care, coordinating the multidisciplinary team to provide heart failure and respiratory care in the community. Their work will consider ways to best respond to people with high care needs by way of virtual care and remote monitoring. They will also put the Care Navigation App to the test and look at ways to complement the Winter Strategy.
  While the positions are initially three-month secondments to ‘kickstart’ the model, we are looking to create a Clinical Nurse Specialist network to provide a robust chronic care clinical and advisory service. The current work trialling the model is an important first step in building district-wide confidence in this new way of working.

• Theory of Change development
  The Living Well initiative is based on the quadruple aim of improving the health care experience for people, their families and carers; improving experiences for service providers; improving health outcomes for the population; and improving the cost efficiency of the health system.
  To ensure we meet those aims, the Living Well team recently started working with the George Institute. The George Institute is leading the evaluation process on Collaborative Commissioning using ‘Theory of Change’ methodology to support the evaluation. Theory of Change outlines the key points of change and the virtuous cycles – the chains of events in which one desirable occurrence leads to another, resulting in continuous improvement – required to help us achieve our overarching goals. 
  The first step is to develop a local Theory of Change through co-design to support implementation and evaluation of our care pathway that includes our local context, challenges and planned care pathway. This will help us explain how and why our interventions are expected to lead to the desired outcomes and guide the development of a suite of formative evaluation activities that will track and monitor our progress.
  In this initial phase of 6-7 weeks, the evaluation team will finalise the local Theory of Change and develop the draft plan for formative evaluation.