Veterans and Triple Aim: Building Social Opportunities for the Veterans Community
By Carlos Santos, Improvement Advisor
A veteran is an individual aged 16+ who has previously served at least one day in the UK armed forces, with around 2.4 million currently living in the UK. ELFT has recently signed up to be part of the armed forces covenant, which aims to demonstrate the Trust’s commitment to ensuring veterans and their families have equity in terms of access to government and commercial services as the rest of the population.
To work towards this, a Triple Aim project has recently been started to help tackle outcomes, experience of care and value for money for veterans in the communities the Trust serves.
You can hear why this project is so key for improving the quality of life for veterans by listening to some thoughts from the project team in the video below:
Sponsored by Dr Paul Gilluley (Chief Medical Officer) and Led by Jane Kelly (ELFT Clinical Lead for Recovery and Veterans Alliance Clinical Lead), this project brings together a number of partners such as The Poppy Factory London , The British Legion and the Veterans Covenant Healthcare Alliance. Several veterans and family members are also core members of the project team, helping ensure the work is co-produced.
Firstly, the team set about defining the population and sub-populations that they were wanting to work with, as they felt that different groups would have specific needs. These are presented below in figure 1.
Figure 1 Sub-populations within the veterans community. The sub-populations in pink are those that will be tackled initially.
Following this the team created a purpose statement for the project in partnership with veterans and families committing to “work together in partnership to build health and social opportunities for Veterans and their families, to ensure acceptance and adding value to the Veterans Community”
With the purpose statement as the anchor of the work, the team then created an initial driver diagram to help them identify the different areas they would need to work on. Figure 2 highlights this below.
Figure 2: Project Driver Diagram
The next step for the team is to undertake a three-part data review to understand the assets and needs of the population. This will help further guide the team of where they might need to focus their efforts and help develop and interventions. Additionally, the team is developing the family of measures to help them know if the changes they are making will result in an improvement.
References:
- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/874821/6.6409_CO_Armed-Forces_Veterans-Factsheet_v9_web.pdf
