Information, Advice and Guidance in NEL

North East Lincolnshire Clinical Commissioning Group and North East Lincolnshire Council have a shared focus on ensuring that North East Lincolnshire citizens are able to access good quality information, advice and guidance regarding the support available to them across health and social care services.

In the summer of 2016, members of the local community were invited to take part in a survey to share their views about accessing information, advice and guidance.

Evaluating the Feedback

A number of responses were received. Some of the key findings and conclusions drawn from undertaking the survey were:

  • Most people would rather seek professional help or talk to someone when looking for information and advice, but the internet is a popular way of looking for both health and social care information and advice particularly for people from younger age groups
     
  • Most people are confident that they can find trustworthy sources of health and social care information in North East Lincolnshire and advice, but there is room for improvement
     
  • There is clarity about where to find health care information and advice, but some uncertainty about where to seek social care information and advice
     
  • The overall opinion of the health and social care information and advice offering in North East Lincolnshire is largely positive, with specific mention to positive experiences with SPA.

For the full survey findings report, please click here.

Now we have this information, what are the next steps?

Accord members might remember that following this engagement exercise, a ‘No Wrong Front Door’ workshop was held with partners across health, social care and connected services. From this a set of principles for our approach to information, advice and guidance was developed. 

We are now working to ensure that we have a navigable system in North East Lincolnshire where people know where and how to access the information, advice and guidance they need, can easily do so, or if not, can be efficiently navigated by professionals. 

Existing groups are complementing this work. For example, our ‘Citizen Access Workstream’, has looked at how people access information and has created a series of ‘frequently asked questions’. These will be tested soon with members of the public. The Citizen Access Workstream is working to ensure that citizens are navigated to the trusted source of information, and work is underway to reduce digital duplication of information.

Our long-term goal is to create a multi-agency single point of information for health and social care which will also include things like housing and transport information.