Health & Social Care Business Unit

BVSC’s Health and Social Care Business Unit delivers a range of projects with a strong focus on building partnerships with the health and care system and voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector (VCFSE) in Birmingham.  An overview of recent and current projects and activity is provided below:

• Non-digital engagement – Public Health: We worked with Birmingham Public Health and their commissioned community providers around non-digital engagement. Resources and Toolkits have been created to support engagement activities in the community. During March 2022 we also delivered a number of support sessions for those in receipt of funding through Commonwealth Games legacy funding. Face to Face Verbal Communications, Written Communication, Public Events and Telephone Communications.   

• Early Help & Route 2 Wellbeing Birmingham portal: BVSC manages the Route 2 Wellbeing Birmingham portal and we recently migrated a wide range of services and support mapped by the Early Help Community Connectors across Birmingham. This aims to support children, families and young people to find local support including, health, out of school activities, physical and mental wellbeing, social care, leisure activities, domestic abuse and education and more.  View the new Early Help landing page which was launched in May 2022. 

• Social Prescribing – Through the National Academy of Social Prescribing (NSAP), we have been supporting the Midlands Regional Social Prescribing team around elements of the Learning Together programme, with a focus on Birmingham. As part of this, Local Infrastructure Organisations across the Midlands come together and share learning from each area.  

• Embedding the Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise (VCFSE) sector into the Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care System (ICS): BVSC is working with Warwickshire & Solihull Community and Voluntary Action (CAVA) and NHS Birmingham and Solihull on this programme, with CAVA supporting developments in Solihull.

On the 1^st July 2022 Integrated Care Systems (ICS) were launched across the UK.  The ICS that covers Birmingham and Solihull is officially entitled Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care System.  We have provided a summary of developments and key updates in these slides along with progress of the VCFSE Leadership Alliance (Dynamic Network) – the single point of contact into the health and care system.

We have held quarterly place-based meetings for the sector since December 2021 and have explored: the landscape and priorities of the VCFSE sector in each place, the role, function and aims of the VCFSE Leadership Alliance (Dynamic Network), ICS Developments and Neighbourhood Integration.  We are delivering a range of activities for this programme up to March 2023 and updates will be shared through our news and event pages.  

• Digital Inclusion Co-production Framework – Building on, and learning from the co-production work undertaken for the Personalised Care Co-production Framework, we are leading on a project supporting the BSol ICS’s agenda around Digital Inclusion. The project will run until March 2023. Through the project, BVSC will be working in partnership with five VCFSE partner organisations to develop a Co-production Framework for future engagement activities focusing on digital health and care services.  The partner organisations will recruit diverse groups across Birmingham and Solihull, to represent citizens with lived experience from seldom seen, seldom heard communities.      

• Compassionate City Charter / Compassionate Communities – we are part of the Compassionate City Network for Birmingham, building partnerships and supporting developments around care, dying, death and bereavement across Birmingham.  We were involved with Birmingham gaining Compassionate City Charter status in March 2022 – the first city in the UK.  Planning is underway to take forward different strands of work under the Charter.  We are also involved with BRHUmB – the research hub for end of life and palliative care in the West Midlands, which is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

• Personalised Care Co-production Framework (PCCF) – Earlier this year, we completed a short-term project to support the Personalisation team at Birmingham and Solihull Clinical Commissioning Group (BSol CCG) to co-produce a Personalised Care Framework for use across different NHS pathways. This work was undertaken with a diverse group of citizens with lived experience of personalised care and/or co-production.  Existing frameworks were identified along with boundaries to their current use to form recommendations for future adapted use.  The recommendations were strongly underpinned by audio recordings of participants’ stories. For the Report: Click Here

Get in touch!

If you would like further details on any of these projects or how your organisation can work with BVSC, please contact [email protected].