Calderdale and Huddersfield Foundation Trust

Ambition: Systematic buddy support and group consultations across COPD and Pain pathways

Calderdale and Huddersfield Foundation Trust's vision is to turn into an integrated care organisation and shift service provision for people with long term conditions away from the acute setting and into the community.

Building on the work of the Co-creating Health programme, they want to mainstream coproduction by: rolling out Self Management Support patient groups; creating a formal buddy system to provide ongoing support in the community to people living with long term conditions; introducing group consultations and system navigators; and redesigning services for pain management with service professionals, patients and carers.

The trust has already trained up service users to be tutors in their self management course and is committed to using these routes to enable service users to become more employable in services and beyond. They have completed a blueprint of how this new service will function to help it scale. 

Furthermore, group consultations have now commenced, and early feedback suggests that it could result in people understanding their condition more fully, alongside their peers, and using lower dosages of medicine.

For more on the project download the detailed People Powered Health project summaries