Community services help you to manage your health, avoid visits to Accident and Emergency, and support you to remain living as independently as possible for as long as possible.

And from 1 April 2020, two of your existing local providers are joining forces with your local NHS commissioners to make them better.

Working in partnership with other NHS and social care services and with you and your family and carers, our community teams work from the community and in your home.

Community services like these have always existed, however, in recent years they have become central to the NHS Long Term Plan. This is a 10 year plan funded by the Government in 2018 to improve and transform community services. Thereby ensuring we deliver a wider range and higher quality of support to you, whilst ensuring a sustainable NHS fit for the future.

Our community service is made up of individual services you may already know including specialist nursing care, district nursing, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy as well as ‘rehabilitation’ wards at community hospitals which provide support to return to living independently after a stay in hospital, or when you’ve been ill.

Our adult community services are already working well and the organisations that provide them are rated ‘good’ by the Care Quality Commission. But by working together with other local providers, and investing time, energy and existing local expertise into our community services we can make them even better.

1 April is just the start, but over the coming years you will find:

• You will need to visit, and stay in, our local acute hospitals less often. We will achieve this by levelling up the care we can provide in the community, using experts from those hospitals to develop our new community services.

• You will be able to contact us, and we will be available to visit you, for longer. We are extending our hours to 8 a.m. – 8 p.m. where services currently operate to different hours.

• We will be better connected, as we’re aligning our services with groups of GP services, known as Primary Care Networks.

• You won’t have to tell your story every time you see someone. We will use technology to be able to share knowledge and expertise, and – where we have your consent – your medical records between services you are using.

Our new partnership will also offer better opportunities for our colleagues, by encouraging professional development and cross team learning. This will help to make North East Hampshire, Farnham and Surrey Heath areas an even more attractive place to work for our hardworking NHS staff.