Bridging the Covid gap together

The project is bringing together 9 Community Organisations, 3 NHS trusts, and 50 GP practices to improve the lives of people who have a life-limiting illness, or long-term conditions, including Long COVID. These people will be supported through a personalised care approach, and a community peer support model to support them to live the best life they can and to be more resilient in the future. 

One Wirral is a Social Enterprise built from a need identified in Primary and Community Care to work together to be more efficient. They have the skills and experience to oversee the project, monitor the outcomes, capture the learning, and share it with other regions because of the model, many parts of the project will continue afterwards, leaving a legacy.

The project will:

1) Improve well-being and personal resilience

The project will offer resilience training to people accessing the service, healthcare staff and partner staff to build knowledge on techniques to for better personal resilience.

Each partner organisation has their current service offer that people bridging the gap referrals will also be able to access. The strength of collaboration is that people will be able to access more services than the ‘bridging the COVID gap’ offer that they are referred in for.

2) Strengthening Communities

With the social distancing restrictions, the third sector have had to stop valuable face-to-face community services which offer connections and purpose to life. They are keen to re-establish those services and would like to co-produce them with people. They have an opportunity to ‘reset’ and to develop them with members of the community. This project will fund 3 WTE Community Support Workers to work with people accessing the service to develop community initiatives to enable this to happen.

3) Developing and distributing Long COVID information to Primary care professionals and people of the Wirral

11 case studies have highlighted 3 themes: outdoor space use is important; people with cancer need support; and a lack of good information available about Long COVID and its symptoms, especially amongst the younger generation. This project will work with health care professionals to develop information that is relevant to people, including people from BAME communities. There will be a campaign to roll out this information and how people access the ‘bridging the COVID gap’ service.

4) Supporting NHS to discharge complex COVID and Long COVID patients

The local hospital has been proactive in starting a Long COVID rehabilitation service, supporting over 70 patients to be able to get out of hospital safely. Due to the complex needs, they are struggling to discharge patients from the service. This project will address this by offering non-clinical community support to patients.