It’s at the heart of everything we do in the County Durham Care Partnership – improving the way our health and social care teams work together in County Durham to give you better, connected health services, closer to home.

Our provision of positive health and social care has always been joined up, but here in County Durham we make those links much more directly and that benefits everyone. These effective collaborations are bringing real, positive improvement to people’s health and wellbeing and their experience of care in County Durham.

As the County Durham Care Partnership, Durham County Council delivered adult social care services work more closely with NHS community health provision, wrapped around primary care. This brings people on the frontline closer together, breaking down traditional organisational barriers to create new blended ways of working.

The Northern Echo:

We have a shared vision across the Partnership and we live by it, delivering everyday by collaborating and driving our ambition to develop even more system-wide joined up models of care through all the organisations involved across County Durham.

By increasing the effective ways our health and social care teams work together we’re better able to concentrate on the people who most need our support. For instance, it makes it easier to join up care packages, linking in with specialist services as needed, supporting our most vulnerable residents, including those in care homes, and providing invaluable medical support to community hospitals.

It also allows us to build on our strong sense of community, the skill and commitment of health and care staff, our network of GP practices and improvements in health and wellbeing services to make life easier for those people who get health and social care in the county. And with as much care as possible delivered locally in our communities, it helps those who need health and social care to live independently in their own homes for as long as possible.

It is this shared commitment to serve residents across the county that is helping to bring about faster improvements in care, helping to keep the people of County Durham happy, healthy and at home.

Find out more about the work of the County Durham Care Partnership here:  www.cdcarepartnership.co.uk and follow Twitter @CDCarePartners and Facebook: CountyDurhamCarePartnership.