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Making Your Voice Heard..
The first decade of the Eastern Health and Social Services
Council
Getting down to business...1992-93
New community care legislation
introduced to Northern Ireland in the early 1990s formed
an important backdrop to the work of the Council in the
formative period. Under this legislation, people needing
often elaborate and complex arrangements for their care,
such as those with mental health problems or severe physical
disability, were to have this provided to them either at
home or in a less institutional environment.
This challenging legislation
provided an early opportunity for the Council to work with
its three associate-councils - those established within
the Northern, Western and Southern health and social services
Board areas.
This process resulted in important
proposals being presented to the Department of Health and
Social Services, to the four area health and social services
Boards and newly formed Trust organisations. This work specifically
recommended that:
- People should be given more and much
clearer information about the nature of community care
schemes.
- People should have a genuine say about
the services they receive and play a bigger part in shaping
the nature, range and quality of these.
- More effective arrangements were needed
to properly assess the needs of people seeking community
care and
- Special effort was needed to make the
complaints process surrounding community care schemes
more user friendly and better understood.
A second major landmark of
this first, formative year of the Council was its recognition
that in a rapidly changing health and social services sector,
quality should continue to take precedence over efficiency.
While the new 'internal market' had emphasised a need for
value-for-money among all services, the Council stressed
that a critical balance was needed between costs and quality.
To help strike this balance, the Council advocated that:
- Patients and other consumers
must be involved in setting standards
- There must be a fully open process
for setting and measuring the standard offered by all
services.
The Council was clearly beginning
to make its voice heard...
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