Energy costs have gone up and while it is an increase for some, it is a crisis for others. We've joined forces with BD Giving, BD Collective and ELBA to launch the ‘Fuel Up’ campaign, enabling Barking and Dagenham community members that can, to help other community members in need, by donating some or all of their monthly £67 government energy rebate that is being sent to every household.

Donations will be used to provide vouchers to those in need, through the BD Collective’s Food Network, a network that supports 20 local organisations that provide essential food and other necessities to vulnerable residents. 

The BD Collective Food Network supports many hundreds of Barking & Dagenham residents and the number of households using their services has continued to rise since the start of the energy crisis. We are hoping to raise £5000 for our community’s most vulnerable residents and whilst some may pledge to give their entire rebate, any donation no matter how small, will make a huge difference to many who are having to make difficult decisions between heating their homes, or putting food on the table.

Matt Skinner, CEO, Care City added “Care City is delighted to support this important initiative in Barking and Dagenham. Nobody should be forced to make a decision over eating or keeping warm. We are grateful to anyone who can donate even a small amount of their government fuel support to help - it could make all the difference.”

Geraud de Ville de Goyet, CEO, BD Giving said: We are thrilled to collaborate with BD_Collective, Care City, and ELBA on the Fuel Up campaign. With the increasing needs of families and individuals in our community, it is reassuring to know that our community has a long history of generosity. That’s why we invite everyone who can to join us and fuel up Barking and Dagenham.”

This video shares insights from two Foodbank volunteers as to how donations can make a difference. To pledge, please visit bdgiving.org.uk/donate

Our 2021/22 Year In Review showcases our work in research, innovation and workforce development, in collaboration with East London’s health and care system, with the aim of developing and strengthening health and social care delivery and workforce models for the future.

Care City Year in Review 2021/22

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Matthew Skinner as Care City’s new Chief Executive Officer. Matthew will lead Care City in its mission to secure a happier, healthier older age for East Londoners, through research, innovation and workforce development. Other responsibilities will include securing future investments for the business, leading relationships with key partners and continuing to raise the profile of Care City through generating a positive image of the contribution the work makes to the community it serves.

As Care City takes possession of its long-term office in Barking next Spring, Matthew will also be responsible for making a success of this home, using it to bring benefit to the local community and as a platform to showcase Care City’s work and mission.

Matthew joins the team from TPXimpact where, as Managing Director, he oversaw the delivery of complex and innovative organisational change projects for public sector clients that have created significant improvements for users of adult social care and health, children's social care, housing and community services. Prior to that Matthew has held roles at FutureGov, Norfolk County and Lambeth Councils.

Commenting on his appointment Matthew Skinner said “I am hugely excited about joining Care City. In my roles at TPXimpact and FutureGov I've overseen our work across government and health, ensuring we deliver lasting and tangible impact for citizens. I've witnessed how poor and disjointed health provision, inadequate housing, the lack of community infrastructure, and access to good work are already deepening inequalities in our ageing society. I’m delighted to have the chance to get closer to the action again making a difference in health and care services”.

Professor Paul Corrigan, Chair, Care City Board said: “Matthew’s values and passion complement the existing Care City Team and with this strong background in public health, local government and consultancy, he is the leader Care City needs to deliver on its ambitious agenda. I am confident that Matthew’s proven ability to lead teams, create strategic clarity and drive social improvements, will deliver great results and opportunities for our East London community.”

Matthew will start in his new post in November 2022.

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260 students and families signed up to learn more about careers in London’s health sector at this year’s Skills London, the UK’s largest jobs and careers event for 14-24 year olds.

As part of the Mayors Academies Programme, a programme focused on championing London’s skills offer and supporting Londoners to gain the skills they need to enter into good work, we attended the event along with representatives from North East London, South West London and North West London Integrated Care Boards and supported by Health Careers Ambassadors, to engage and inspire young people to consider a job in the sector, promoting the 350 job roles available and the entry points and access routes through them.

Careers Ambassadors are individuals who have experience in the job they’re promoting and can talk with passion about their jobs and why healthcare careers are such worthwhile roles to consider. Event participants were introduced to Allied Health Professionals from North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT), Lecturers in Nursing from University of East London (UEL), Nurses from SW London and given guidance and support on NHS roles that may be suitable for them.

Participants also competed against each other in a “Fastest Surgeon Wins” Operation game, given an opportunity to see and experience some of the digital health technology available within the sector and play quizzes to help them determine suitable health careers based on their skills and likes and dislikes.

The majority of the visitors to the stand were aged between 16-17 and indicated that they would like to know more about work experience opportunities, with accessibility to apprenticeships and information on entry level roles also big topics of conversation.

Stewart Weller, Programme Manager, North East London Integrated Care Board commented: “The local career opportunities in health and social care are diverse, ranging from data and digital technology to patient facing services. Skills London was a great opportunity to showcase these roles to young people & offer help and advice on qualifications, apprenticeships and career pathways. With over 350 job roles in health and social care and approximately 9000 job vacancies available locally, the opportunities are there for our young people. We just need to help them find the right job for them.”

To learn more about working in health and social care, visit www.careers.eastlondonhcp.org.uk

Work around frailty and communication is not new. The People’s Description of Frailty, co-constructed through the work of the London Clinical Frailty network, is as follows:

“Frailty is a word that may be used to describe your state of health or that of someone you care for. Being described as ‘frail’, having ‘frailty’ or ‘living with frailty’ may occur

when your body loses its natural reserves. This may be due to a range of factors such as illness, disability or aspects of the ageing process”.

This definition does not work perfectly for everybody, but no definition ever could. It works well as one ‘tool in the toolbox’ for communicating about frailty. The question is, what other tools help to describe frailty and help patients to describe their own experiences of frailty?

We were commissioned by the London Clinical Frailty Network and worked in partnership with UCLPartners to help answer this question by engaging with a broad range of people beginning to experience frailty and related health services to understand their thoughts, feelings and vocabulary around frailty and to test the People’s Description of Frailty. The goal being to help clinicians have richer conversations about frailty with as diverse a range of individuals as possible. 

Read our findings and recommendations in the report here.

Are you a strong administrator? Do you have a willingness to learn and are keen to develop project delivery skills? Are you an excellent communicator, both in writing and speaking? Do you have a proactive approach towards problem solving?

We are looking for a Project Support & Communications Administrator to support the Careers Project Lead to deliver workforce development projects. Specifically our work with North East London Health and Care Partnership (NELHCP) in inspiring and engaging young people and job seekers into local jobs in health and social care through a network of health and social care Careers Ambassadors. Careers Ambassadors use their own experiences of working in health and social care to inspire others to consider roles in the sector. The postholder will work alongside local schools, colleges and Job Centre Plus’s in East London to organise events and briefings where these Ambassadors can share insights into the work they do and routes to access local jobs.

The post holder will also play a key role in supporting our Young Persons Panel, a group of16-18 year olds, who work with us to ensure the voice of young people in East London is accurately reflected in our work.They will be a trusted employee, able to prioritise their own workload, whilst responding today to day situations, unpredictable project issues and proactively requesting support from team members as needed. 

 To succeed in this role, you will:

• Understand and demonstrate the skills needed to work in a project delivery environment
• Be able to work flexibly, communicate with a diverse group of partners and audiences, problem solve and escalate issues that arise where appropriate
• Demonstrate ability in influencing colleagues and collaborators from a wide range of backgrounds and subject areas towards achievement of agreed results

View Project Support & Communications Officer - Careers Job Description

About Us

Care City is a not for profit organisation based in Barking, East London focussed on helping local people to have a healthier, happier older age, through research, innovation and development. It was co-founded in 2013 by the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) and North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) and in June 2019 became an independent Community Interest Company (CIC). A CIC is a special form of limited company which exists primarily to benefit a community and which reinvests any profits in its social purpose. 

Location

• Care City is a high-trust organisation with a strong culture that enables staff to work where they can be most productive
• Care City continues to primarily work remotely – meeting together for a day each fortnight – although opportunities to meet weekly are available.
• However Care City is building a new office in Barking, East London, due for completion early 2023

What we can offer you

Upon successful completion of a six month probationary period the job holder will have the opportunity to undertake the level 4 Associate Project Management apprenticeship. They will learn new skills on an ongoing basis and practice these new skills in the workplace, so gradually developing their project management capability, taking more project management responsibility for agreed projects as time goes on. In addition, we offer:

• Competitive salary (£25K - £30K dependant on experience)
• Contribution to a pension scheme
• Generous annual leave, maternity, paternity, carers and adoption leave
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Flexible working
• Investment in staff training and development
• Supportive governance structure

To apply

To apply please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Please send your CV, with a covering letter, no more than 2 sides of A4, stating why you are interested in this role and how your work experience and any lived experience is relevant to the role. 

Closing Date - Friday, 9th December

I started as CEO at Care City in November, and I’ve been meeting our partners, board and community board members over the last few weeks. Throughout these conversations, I’ve been humbled by the love for Care City, its people and the vital work we help our partners do to improve health and care for citizens.

Today, as I write this blog post, nurses up and down the country are out on the picket lines asking for fairer pay. A result of years of real-term wages falling across the NHS and public sector has brought the system to breaking point. I’m in meetings with partners who describe the crisis in emergency departments and the huge numbers of vacancies in social care and health roles - I’m left with no doubt that this is a system which is broken. 

Despite this, millions of people working in health and social care across the country show up daily, bringing empathy and compassion. Communities, the voluntary sector and organisations like Care City continue to come together to demonstrate how new models of community-powered health, new technologies and ways of working can bring about a fundamental change in how health and care could be delivered. It’s vital that we make this shift to a new model.

Care City is currently delivering an enhanced homecare project. We are training home care workers to equip them with the knowledge to spot deteriorating health in service users, use new technology to take vital signs and, where appropriate, escalate the data to clinicians through a new pathway. This work will help prevent conditions from deteriorating and reduce demand for overstretched GPs by fast-tracking support - ultimately, it will improve lives. As it evolves, we want to explore how families and communities can play a role in this.

This week, the Care City team spent an afternoon together reflecting on our Mission, what it means to us, and where we want to take the organisation in the next few years. It was projects like this, where we are delivering real change that cuts across our expertise in innovation, research and workforce development, that we want to be doing more of. 

Care City wants to help fix the health and social care crisis. This means we need to work with our partners strategically across East London. As an ‘outside-in’ partner, we will be a critical friend, bringing new approaches, new ways of working, new technology and ideas along with our empathy. We have learned, and will continue to learn, from all our projects and are committed to ensuring that what we learn is shared across our partners. This will improve the pace of innovation and reduce duplication so that solutions affect a much larger population.   

Over the last year, we’ve been privileged to work across North East London (NEL) with partners, including BHR Academy, BHR Training Hub, Care Providers Voice and a fantastic network of Careers Ambassadors from across the local health and care sector, to help support the recruitment of new skills and younger people into health and care roles. We were delighted to support NEL Health Care Partnership’s funding bid to join the Mayor’s Academies Programme, supporting 750 individuals from underrepresented groups to find good work (direct employment, apprenticeships, or self/employment/freelance) in North East London’s health and care sector.

Care City will use the learning from our careers work to help develop local career ladders of opportunity into apprenticeships and then into professional qualifications (e.g. Allied Health Professionals, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Occupational Therapists). Working across our networks with the community, schools, colleges and universities, we will help join up pathways to bring new skills, experience and knowledge into the health and care sector in East London.

Next year we’ll move to our new permanent home in Axe Street, Barking. This will be a space where we can bring citizens, organisations and people across the health and care sector together with other partners to innovate. This will be a space that roots us in our community, a space to help further connect our partners with local people and solve problems at a place-based level.

We are a small and agile organisation but have a massive footprint and tremendous trust across East London. We also have a fantastic community board and young persons panel full of ambassadors for our work in the area. Their continued input into our work will help ensure our projects are inclusive and that equity and fairness are baked into our approach.

In addition to all of this, there is so much more that we are looking forward to working on next year, including:

• Launching our new website that will showcase our work and the stories of our communities and partners.
• Developing our long-term partnership with UCLPartners to work together on their dementia innovation programme. This partnership will also see us support cancer diagnostic innovations and help with their mental health programme.
• Amplifying the work we have done this year to test the People’s definition of Frailty - see our report
• Developing innovative solutions with the community to tackle fuel poverty.

If any of this resonates with you, we’d like to talk to you. 

As this year draws to a close, I want to thank the Care City team, our community board, the board of directors, and all of our partners. I look forward to working with all of you in 2023 to do even bigger and better things to help bring about a happier, healthier age for East Londoners. 

New research we've led alongside UCLPartners and The Health Foundation and published in the British Medical Journal on 15 September 2022 examines the proportion of new, publicly funded home care packages associated with discharge from hospital, and identifies the groups of hospital patients that have the greatest likelihood of receiving home care after discharge.

By using the Care City Cohort dataset, the team was able to clearly show that across all age ranges, hospital admissions were strongly associated with a need for new home care packages. And that new home care needs were most common among patients who were older, had more comorbidities, were admitted in an emergency, and had longer hospital stays. 

To get the best care possible, people need to be able to move freely across health and social care settings, getting consistent support and advice. This is why understanding a patient’s journey and their service interactions is crucial. Linked datasets, which combine health and social care data can offer important insights for service planners and policy makers, vital during this time of increasing financial and workforce pressures.

The Care City Cohort remains one of very few linked datasets that connects council data with health and social care service use across hospital, primary, community, mental health and community care settings. This is a powerful tool in understanding the relationships between health and social care, such as in this novel exploration of the role of healthcare services as the route into social care.   

Older people and people with complex needs often require both health and social care services, but there is limited insight into individual journeys across these services. This research funded by The Health Foundation and conducted by Care City and UCLPartners across the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, aims to provide a detailed understanding of the relationship between hospital admissions and home care provision. This should help health and local authority planners and commissioners anticipate and plan for future home care need.

Home care includes providing help with personal care and routine household tasks, aiming to improve individuals’ health and well-being, and to maintain their independence. In England, an estimated 714,000 adults received publicly or privately funded homecare services in 2019^[1],[2]. With an ageing population, fuelled in part by medical intervention enabling people to live longer with chronic conditions, a decrease in the number of care home beds and rising care costs, and a national ambition to support people to live independently for as long as possible, the demand for home care is likely to increase³.

The research shows that hospitals are a major referral route into domiciliary care. While new and acute illnesses account for many domiciliary care packages, exacerbations of long-term conditions and age- and frailty-related conditions are also an important driver.

The team’s finding is novel. While previous studies have examined the overlap between health and social care use^[3] no studies have yet looked at the role of healthcare services as the route into social care. They have important implications given the rising rates of emergency admissions in England and the pressures on social care services.

Dr Jenny Shand, Chief Strategy Officer, UCLPartners commented: “The Care City Cohort is a unique resource that allows us to get a better idea of service use across settings of care. For this research into home care service use we have been able to show how someone’s point of entry into the care system can help us predict what future care support they might need. It will be great to see the Care City Cohort being used by other research projects to further inform care planning, and demonstrate the benefits of a system wide, integrated approach.”

For more information see here, or to use the Care City Cohort linked dataset to inform your research, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

^[1] LaingBuisson. Homecare and Supported Living. UK Market Report. Third edition. 2020

^[2] Office of National Statistics. Population estimates for the UK, England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland: mid-2019. 2020; Accessed online

^[3] Bardsley M, Georghiou T, Chassin L, et al. Overlap of hospital use and social care in older people in England. J Heal Serv Res Policy. 2012;17(3):133–9. doi:10.1258/jhsrp.2011.010171

We are delighted to announce the appointment of James Sinclair as Chief Operating Officer of Care City.

In his new role, James will provide executive leadership for Care City’s operational functions, maximising the opportunities of partnership work across the whole North East London health and care community, commissioning bodies and national partners, and continuing to shape a strong social enterprise, with a mission of happier, healthier, older age for East Londoners. James joins the team from NELFT where he is a Research Delivery Manager, responsible for Trust-wide identification, feasibility, delivery and implementation of research funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and supports research business development initiatives through strategic alliances and partnerships.

He has also authored publications including ‘The impact of volunteering on the volunteer: findings from a peer support programme for family carers of people with dementia’ [1] and ‘Consensus views on advance planning for dementia’ [2] .

James is joining the Care City team as it heads into an exciting new phase, preparing to open the doors of a new permanent base in Barking, supporting the launch of the NELHCP Health Hub, part of the Mayor’s Academies Programme and embedding itself into exciting long-term partnerships both locally and regionally.

Professor Paul Corrigan, Chair, Care City Board said: “James has significant experience of NHS and academic research, design and implementation of innovative growth strategies and leadership excellence. His background provides the perfect complement to Care City’s focus on research, innovation and workforce development and I look forward to working with him to continue Care City’s commitment to improving the lives of our local population”.

Commenting on his appointment, James said: “I am delighted to be joining Care City and supporting its growth to bring continued benefit to the local community. As a resident of East London and experience working both as a care assistant and research assistant on dementia related studies, I have always been passionate about the care sector and supporting older adults to live their best lives. This is a great opportunity to do just that and help Care City grow its social impact. I can’t wait to get started.”

James will start in his new post on 1st August 2022.  

[1] Charlesworth, G.M., Sinclair, J.B., Brooks, A.E., Sullivan, T., Ahmad, S., & Poland, F. (2017). The impact of volunteering on the volunteer: findings from a peer support programme for family carers of people with dementia. Health Soc Care Community, 25(2), 548–558. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.12341

[2] Sinclair, J.B., Oyebode, J.R., & Owens, R.G. (2016). Consensus views on advance care planning for dementia: a Delphi study. Health Soc Care Community, 24(2), 165-174. https://doi.org/10.1111/hsc.12191

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