Care Coordinator

Care co-ordinators help to co-ordinate and navigate care across the health and care system, helping people make the right connections, with the right teams at the right time. They can support people to become more active in their own health and care and are skilled in assessing people’s changing needs. Care co-ordinators are effective in bringing together multidisciplinary teams to support people’s complex health and care needs.

They can be an effective intervention in supporting people to stay well particularly those with long term conditions, multiple long-term conditions, and people living with or at risk of frailty.

Training Requirements

Care Coordinators require a strong foundation in enabling and communication skills as set out in the core Curriculum for Personalised Care. These can be achieved via a two day health coaching skills course and additional training as guided by NHS England.

Care Coordinators should also access statutory and mandatory training, including but not limited to:

  • principles of information governance, accountability and clinical governance
  • maintenance of accurate and relevant records of agreed care and support needs
  • identify when it is appropriate to share information with carers and do so
  • the professional and legal aspects of consent, capacity, and safeguarding

Care Coordinators should be familiar with the six components of the universal model for personalised care with a specific focus on:

  • Shared decision making which ensures that individuals are supported to make decisions that are right for them;
  • Enabling choice, including legal rights to choice which is a collaborative process through which a clinician supports a patient to reach a decision about their treatment;
  • Social prescribing and community-based support which gives people time, focusing on ‘what matters to me’ and takes a holistic approach to people’s health and wellbeing connecting people to community groups and statutory services for practical and emotional support;
  • Personalised care and support planning which is key for people receiving health and social care services. It is an essential tool to integrate the person’s experience of all the services they access so they have one joined-up plan that covers their health and wellbeing needs;
  • Supported self-management empowers people to manage their ongoing physical and mental health conditions themselves and the new roles of Social Prescribing Link Workers, Health & Wellbeing Coaches and Care Coordinators will support GPs and other primary care colleagues to do this;
  • Personal health budgets (PHBs) which are an amount of money to support a person’s health and wellbeing needs.

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