Agenda item

The Committee considered the report of the Chair of the Starting Well Partnership and Corporate Director of Children and Yong People’s Services that update Members on the work of the Starting Well Partnership (for copy of report, see file of minutes).

The Commissioning Manager for Children’s Services, County Durham Integrated Commissioning Team was in attendance to deliver a presentation that highlighted the following (for copy of presentation, see file of minutes):

·       What the partnership does and who is part of it

·       Updates from the previous annual presentation

·       Projects and programmes delivered in 2022/23

·       Partnership priorities for 2023/2024

·       Ongoing projects and programmes

·       Overview of the challenges faced within the Partnership

Councillor Deinali asked for further information on the integrated therapies in schools, in particular what this would look like in schools.

The Commissioning Manager responded that they were going for a fully integrated service that was embedded in the classroom by upskilling the education staff in the classroom.

Councillor Deinali asked if the impact of the pilot scheme could be shared with Members. This was agreed by the Commissioning Manager.

Councillor Robson asked what career guidance was provided to those who were about to leave care.

The Commissioning Manager indicated that this came under the preparation for adulthood work stream that they had not planned yet but in the annual update next year they would be able to share their findings.

Councillor Mavin asked how the pilot differed to what was already happening in schools.

The Commissioning Manager indicated that currently it was not always a therapist that was working with the child and a number of children go out of school for their therapy appointment and they were trying to minimise this.

Councillor Walton referred to the priorities for 2023/24 and that she had not heard of ‘Know Your Place’ and asked for feedback on the top 10 challenges faced by practitioners. The Commissioning Manager agreed to bring these back to Members.

Mrs Gunn referred to the integrated therapies and was surprised to hear that this was not happening already in schools. She continued by asking how the council compared to other local authorities who were currently offering integrated therapies in schools. She commented that it was only aspirational to roll it out to mainstream schools as it impacts on other areas such as mental health. She stated that children do not have access to Educational Phycologists as schools only received 2 days per year which is 2 children which is only scratching the surface.

The Commissioning Manager stated that the aspiration to roll out integrated therapy in mainstream schools was aspirational as they currently did not have fully staffed teams in the Trust. They were focusing on special schools and if they could fully staff the therapy team then they should be able to roll out to mainstream schools. She commented that they needed Educational Psychologists, but they were not there to recruit.

Mrs Gunn asked if Educational Psychologists were moving to the private sector for better pay.

The Commissioning Manager responded that the work in the NHS is very pressured as they did not have enough staff, so people leave to go to the private sector that creates more pressure on the NHS. She stated that it was difficult to encourage people to come back to the NHS. She referred to identifying needs and advised that they have a system that was need led that they were doing around neurodiversity work.

Councillor Scurfield commented that she was pleased to see that NHS dentistry was a priority as it was becoming a national crisis and asked if the early years group were aware of the state of oral health and what was the group doing to address these issues. She also asked if the groups were looking at children’s readiness for school.

The Commissioning Manager responded that readiness for school had not been identified as an issue, but she could suggest this to the partnership. With regard to dentistry a colleague had provided some information that dental commissioning had moved from NHS England into the North East and North Cumbria ICB in July which gave more control going forward. A number of actions had been implemented including additional funding to extend practice opening hours for emergency care and to improve one to one triage and out of hours treatment. There had also provided a lot of support to practices to recruit overseas dentists and an incentive payment to target areas where it had been difficult to recruit. Three dentists had been secured through this scheme over the last couple of years. There had been a service redesign and dental therapists could now undertake fillings, they were awaiting a national dental recovery plan and the NHS workforce plan that came out last week included dentistry based upon increasing the number of apprenticeships and expanding the training and have a tie in period after qualification.

Councillor Scurfield asked what the groups know of the impact of the current situation on children’s oral health.

The Commissioning Manager indicated that the partnership did have a discussion around this and have the oral health strategy partnership and part of that discussion was around water fluoridation but was a national question and not for the public health team anymore.

Resolved: That the contents of the report and presentation be noted.