What are we doing?
Sutton Council is getting ready to welcome 100 or so new members of staff on 1 April as the Health Visiting and School Nursing Service (aka the Healthy Child Programme) comes in house.
The Health Visiting Service works with all children and families in the borough from ages 0 to five – to promote their health and address concerns about physical and mental/emotional wellbeing. There are five mandated health/developmental assessments for all children in the borough in their first 2.5 years of life.
The School Nursing Service is responsible for the 5-19 years element of the Healthy Child Programme, to all primary and high schools in Sutton (excluding private schools). This includes the delivery of the National Childhood Measurement Programme (for detecting overweight and obese children in reception year and year 6); support to schools around the health needs of its pupils and the delivery of PSHE; and direct support to children in high schools on mental wellbeing, sexual health, smoking, drugs and alcohol.
There is also a safeguarding children’s team – which provides safeguarding support and supervision to the health visiting and school nursing teams – and an admin team – which provides back office support and the telephone helpline.
Why are we doing this?
These specialist staff used to be part of the Royal Marsden NHS Trust, but following the decision by the Marsden to serve notice to both Sutton Council and the Sutton CCG on their contracts for the provision of community health services, the Council has decided to take the services in house.
Bringing these services in house gives us a real opportunity to join up provision in the borough targeting support for our most vulnerable children and families.
What does it mean?
We won’t need to find an additional 100 desk spaces at the Civic Centre as these staff are based out in the community. Our health visitors will continue to operate out of the Children’s Centres across the borough and the school nursing team and admin team will move to the first floor of the Tweeddale Children’s Centre – where their colleagues in the safeguarding team are already located.
Latest updates
Sutton health and care at home slides from 7 March meeting
HR Updates
Meet and greet session has been arranged for 7th March at 4pm in Civic Offices for staff transferring to Sutton. The leadership team and the leader of the Council are looking forward to welcoming all the TUPED staff to Sutton.
Regular meetings and practical sessions with Team leaders are ongoing to ensure familiari and understanding of the different systems in Sutton, such as ITrent and Engage, Sutton’s recruitments system to ensure business continuity for recruitment activities.
Sutton has received the due diligence information and are actively working on building the HCP structure on iTrent and assigning people to post and positions as per the information received from the Royal Marsden in readiness for the implementation date of 1st April 2019.
HR Policies and Procedures
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