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Heartbeat: Trust wins back school nursing contract

April 30, 2019

Its official, we are now formally responsible for delivering the Sandwell school health nursing service for both primary and secondary schools in the borough.

Amanda Geary, Group Director of Operations, Women and Child Health believes this contract is a real opportunity for the organisation and said: “We understand that both primary and secondary schools give us a fantastic opportunity to help shape the future health outcomes for the population of Sandwell so to be given this chance is something special.”

Changes to service providers can often cause disruption. However the quality of service will not be affected, everyone can be reassured.

Amanda added: “Our goal is to keep the transition as smooth as possible and maintain a high quality service for all the schools.”

“The core service model will have very minimal changes in the short term with the existing town based and vulnerable children’s team clusters continuing.”

The model consists of:

  • The community offer – including national and local campaigns
  • The universal offer – health reviews, supporting transition from primary to secondary school, NCMP programme, healthy lifestyle information for secondary school including assemblies, thematic road shows, weekly drop-ins
  • The universal plus service – holistic assessment and active interventions, long-term conditions, medical plans, supporting Sandwell Community School, Youth Offending Service
  • Universal partnership plus – annual LAC health reviews and safeguarding responsibilities.

Heather Bennett, Head of Services, Acute and Community Paediatrics is excited about winning the contract.

She said: “This is a great opportunity to further integrate school nursing into our existing Sandwell community consultant, nursing, health visiting and therapy teams.

“It will also allow us to focus on the delivery of the 0-19 agenda as an integrated team. As an integrated team we are better placed to provide a more responsive service for children, young people and carers with access to a wider pool of expertise.

“We now have a more flexible team who can make a greater contribution to shaping, leading and delivering the multi-disciplinary, seamless approach to health and wellbeing in Sandwell.”