'Inadequate' council enlists NHS to deliver early help services
Tristan Donovan
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Reading Council has commissioned Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to provide integrated early help support to children and families as part of efforts to improve services.
The move will bring together the town's previously separate school nursing and health visiting services and link them more closely with children's centres and other preventative services.
"Through putting in place an integrated health visiting and school nursing service to work with early intervention services the council and Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust will provide excellent support to help families and children access the right service at the right time," said Jan Gavin, the lead member for children's services at Reading Council, which were rated "inadequate" by Ofsted in August 2016.
The new service offers support to families with children from pre-birth to 19 years old or, when a young person has special educational needs, until the age of 25.
Reading's service is based on the Department of Health's Healthy Child Programme framework, which seeks to make children and young people healthier through more collaborative and integrated working.
Graeme Hoskin, Reading's lead member for health, said joining up health, education and early help services in this way would also "help us deliver the best possible services we can with our cut budgets".
In June, an Ofsted monitoring visit found Reading was not improving the quality of its children's services fast enough.
Earlier this year Reading Council announced plans to hand the operation of its children's services to an independent company owned by the local authority. The council said the move would help its services focus fully on their work and make sustainable changes.
Prior to commissioning Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Reading commissioned school nursing and health visiting services under two separate contracts.
