Working with the Health Sector

 

Another Special Feature Roundtable

In June 2008 Benevolence Today invited a small number of health-related charities to a roundtable meeting in Westminster. The aim of the meeting was to build an initial understanding how the coalition can work more closely with others who work to improve patient information about serious and/or long-term health conditions and which policy issues may affect such new cooperation efforts.

The health sector is a complex field involving a variety of stakeholders. From the Department of Health to individuals Primary Care Trusts, professional organisations of health workers to charities promoting better care for specific conditions, services offer different levels of help to patients. There is also a wealth of policy development influencing the health sector at all times, which has an impact on charities providing complementary services to the state health sector.

The meeting brought together health-focused charities with Benevolence Today partners. It showed that currently is the right time for benevolent charities to engage in the policy and lobbying process to ensure any new referral partnerships will be sustainable and meaningful in the context of a future health service.

Raising the level of awareness of benevolent services among health-cause-related charities is one of the missions of the Benevolence Today campaign.

There seems to be a clear need for this. Health workers and health advice officers report that they often see themselves at a loss to give more comprehensive advice to patients.

However, the distributed structure of the health sector will make it a challenge for benevolent funds with the limited staff resource to make large inroads very quickly. It will take time to enable front-line workers and advisers on a large scale to build an understanding of charitable help available. The proactive stance Benevolence has taken to start to tackle the signposting gaps seems to be welcomes by all third parties.

It is clear from the discussion that one of the key challenges for benevolent charities will be to position their services, specifically financial grants, in the context of increased patient choice and individual budgets. Benevolent charities will need to gain a good understanding about these new models and ascertain how their grant funding can relate to developments in overall patient funding.

In order to embed benevolent services better in than before in the wider landscape of advice and help available to people in need, Benevolence Today will engage in more depth with the health sector to follow up on ideas from this roundtable meeting. The benevolent sector's signposting agenda for example promises to have significant potential to line up with the information prescription project for patients trialled by the Department of Health. Benevolence Today will explore further how benevolent charities can tie into this process.

Through the Benevolence Today campaign the most promising cooperation opportunities will be explored over the next 18 months, with a view to develop models that can be used to promote cooperation with a wider variety of organisations.

To define how we relate and can best work with the direct health care sector, and how we can leverage the policy opportunities in the context, is a challenge we have to tackle.