Strategic Community Needs Assessment

Bury’s Strategic Community Needs Assessment

The Strategic Community Needs Assessment (SCNA) is Bury's response to the requirement to carry out a joint strategic needs assessment (jSNA). The jSNA emerged from the Social Care green paper, ‘Independence, wellbeing and choice’ and was reaffirmed in the joint Health and Social Care white paper, ‘Our health, Our care, Our say’.

What is it?

In short, it requires the Executive Director of Adult Care Services (Bury MBC), in conjunction with the Director of Public Health (Bury PCT), the Executive Director of Children’s Services (Bury MBC) and the PCT Director of Commissioning to look across the borough at all agencies dealing with health and well-being (in the widest possible definition) to produce a 10-15 year assessment of current and future needs, both for the community at large and users and potential users of services. This should then form the basis for joint commissioning strategies and action plans to meet those identified needs and should be reflected in the local authority plans and the PCT Local Delivery Plan.

Why do we need one?

There are complex, multi-layered influencing factors that impact on health and well being – these include lifestyle, social and community factors, working conditions and general socio-economic factors, in addition to those factors beyond the individual’s control, such as age, gender and genetics.

In the past, agencies have carried out assessments of different needs in relative isolation, but there is a requirement to combine this information and encourage a ‘whole systems’ approach – this will help us to gain a better understanding of how best to deliver services to gain the required outcomes. It also makes sense across organisations as we have a common set of ‘customers’ in many cases.

The SCNA will, through shared information and a common understanding of need, allow for localised service planning and delivery in the way that best suits the needs of the local community. In addition, it will help to establish the most cost effective methods, making the best use of limited resources across a range of organisations. This ‘whole systems’ approach will also allow more flexibility in the de-commissioning and re-commissioning of services and enable the local community to ’have a say’ in what and how services are delivered. It will also be used to inform the move away from specialist interventions towards more preventative services.

How will we do it?

The toolkit approach consists of three phases:

An audit of who holds what information, where it is held and in what form. This will allow us to collate the borough-wide information and intelligence and to form a baseline. This will take place between February and May 2007.
An assessment of the needs of the various different groups within Bury. This will be done in a number of ways but can include analysis by population, by service use, by prevalence of certain conditions or by age. This will be forward looking and cover a period of 10-15 years. This part is due to take place between April and September 2007.
Action planning to meet these identified needs over the short medium and longer term. This will include testing out with service users and the people of Bury a range of solutions to meet these needs. This work is due to take place between October 2007 and March 2008 and will link to the financial/business planning cycle and inform commissioning arrangements across the borough.

How will this benefit you?

The outputs of this project are designed to:

Encourage a ‘whole system’ approach to planning and delivering services by all partners;
Facilitate integrated commissioning;
Help develop district based service delivery and planning;
Facilitate effective decommissioning/recommissioning of services to meet the identified needs of the community;
Give all stakeholders access to a common set of information to generate a common understanding of the needs of the community;
Assist with benchmarking;
Allow planning to take place over a longer timeframe than previously possible (10-15 years) and the development of a long term joint commissioning strategy;
Develop and encourage preventative service provision and planning;
Achieve better utilisation of limited resources from across partner organisations and facilitate more joined up service provision;
Enable the local community to interact with the local authority and other key partners and providers to ’have a say’ in what services are delivered and how they are delivered; and
Provide an objective ‘health check’ of what is currently being done.

Bury's SCNA Final Report

To download this file please see below. If you are on a broadband connection you can download this file in full but warning this file is 7.08 MB.

Bury SCNA Final Report (7.08MB, 122 page PDF)

Bury SCNA Assets Report (1.27MB, 17 page PDF)

Bury SCNA Executive Summary (79KB, 6 page PDF)

If you are on a dial-up or a slow broadband connection you can download the final report in sections, see below. However some of these files are still quite large, please see the size of the file in brackets at the end of each link to see how big this file is before downloading it.

Alternatively, if this file is too large for you to download, please email us at AdultCareWebsite@bury.gov.uk to request this report either sending to you in the post or via email. Please include your name and full address in the email (including postcode) if you want it posting. You can also phone to request a report on 0161 253 6021.

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