Spreading self-management support: Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust

The trust has a longstanding commitment to testing, championing and delivering self-management support, delivering programmes since 2007, including participating in the Co-creating Health programme. Self-management support is now a key theme of the trust’s quality improvement strategy – an integral part of their approach to service improvement and improving quality of life for patients with long-term conditions.

They are taking a health economy-wide approach to developing and sustaining multiple interventions to support self-management, working on:

• Developing a self care programme incorporating learning from work led by local public health teams, the Co-creating Health programme and the findings from two local health and social care reviews.
• Spreading self-management support across the organisation through distributed leadership and a network of clinical champions. Different functions within the organisation have identified clinical leads for self-management support and they are now working to identify other appropriate long-term conditions to focus on.
• Delivering a service redesign programme that incorporates support for self-management, co-production and maximising the use of technology.
• Strengthening partnership working at a strategic level, through the work streams established across organisations as part of the health and social care strategy review.

The trust is working hard to develop local enthusiasm and understanding about self-management in order to spread the learning. The team will work further to align the trust’s self-management support programme with work taking place in the local health and social care economy. The key mechanism for this is the Kirklees self care strategy group.