Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (BCHC) is a specialist provider of community health services, serving Birmingham and the West Midlands. With 5,500 staff across 300 bases, its 2.2 million annual interactions with patients and service users are increasingly delivered through five localities and 30 neighbourhoods in Birmingham aligned to Primary Care Networks.
Birmingham is a young city, with 85,000 children under five five; 20,000 of them live in poverty. It also has one of the UK's most diverse populations, with 52% coming from Black, Asian and ethnic minority groups.
It felt appropriate to begin my visit at Lakeside Family Hub in Erdington, where I met with Richard Kirby, chief executive and Suzanne Cleary, chief strategy and partnerships officer, and a range of team members.
The Hub is part of the Birmingham Family Hubs Programme, which provides families with a single access point to integrated family support services. It helps them get early help with social, emotional, physical and financial needs. Each hub is bespoke to its local community, building connections between families and services providers by putting relationship quality at the heart of family support.
It’s run by the charity Spurgeons, a strategic partner of Birmingham Forward Steps, a service the trust leads, which provides health and wellbeing services for babies and children up to five.
With funding from the BCHC Trust Charity, the trust can go above and beyond for families, offering early interventions including provision of slow cookers and cooking sessions. The team does great partnership work with its local Mental Health Provider Collaborative, bringing services into the Family Hub to support positive mental health in young people.
The way the trust has addressed long waiting lists for speech therapy for children is impressive – these have been significantly reduced, employing a 'balanced system' where group sessions are used effectively to meet the scale of demand.
I was struck by the level of community connection and emphasis on co-production evident in the work of the team at Lakeside. I spoke to many staff there who are so clearly committed to tackling the deep-seated health inequalities faced by local people and are making a real difference to their lives.
Richard drove me to Washwood Heath Health and Wellbeing Centre, a great example of partnership working with community, diagnostic and urgent treatment care under one roof. This is located in one of the most deprived parts of the city as a prototype Locality Hub for adults. The great team running the Hub described how they've used data to create much more proactive model of care, using a dashboard which gives them a view of all patients in Heartlands Hospital, the local acute site, from the East Birmingham area.
They can visually link into hospital teams to keep on top of discharges, care packages and support to maximise flow and urgent care needs. I also met with an Integrated Neighbourhood Team, who described how it manages support and intervention for people in the community. This brings health, social care and voluntary sector inputs together to support people in the community and respond quickly to crisis points and help avoid admission.
The trust has a clear focus on quality and improvement with its quality improvement approach 'Improving BCHC 2gether'. This delivers the Essential Care Framework, which in turn is based on feedback from patients, service users and colleagues. Richard also described to me the importance of research and innovation in community services, evident in the trust’s approach, and crucial in terms of NHS ambitions to shift care from hospital to community.
I left the trust with a clear sense of the vital role community services in Birmingham play in tackling rising demand and health inequality challenges faced by the system. The real-world solutions evident, particularly in children's services, and the intelligent use of data by dedicated and committed teams to deliver proactive community care was inspiring to see.
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