Thank You Event 2025: Project of the Year – Highly Commended

Every year we celebrate our amazing staff and their achievements at our Thank You ceremony. Board members will surprise colleagues at their bases and present them with a hamper, balloons and a certificate for being shining examples of our magnificent staff behaviours.

The Enhance Project has been named as Highly Commended Project of the Year at this year’s Thank You Event, in recognition of its innovative, collaborative approach to supporting vulnerable individuals in the community.

Nominated by Caroline Schonrock, Senior Change and Improvement Lead, the Enhance programme was praised for demonstrating “great commitment to a ‘test and learn’ approach, working collaboratively to address challenges and effective partnership working.”

Launched in 2022, Enhance was developed to relieve pressure on Neighbourhood Teams (NTs), where clinicians were increasingly supporting non-clinical needs to address health inequalities and provide care beyond clinical support.

The programme is led by Leeds Older People’s Forum (LOPF) and funded by LCH, which also supports 13 third-sector delivery partners (DPs) to offer intensive, tailored support in people’s homes for up to 12 weeks.

Services provided through the programme include, helping to build confidence and trust to engage with health services and attend appointments, physiotherapy exercises to encourage being active, support with arranging medications, liaising with housing and other services to create a safe home, helping to facilitate benefit applications, clothing and fuel grants, encouragement to attend social activities and support with shopping and food.

The programme has had clear financial benefits for LCH with savings estimated at least £287k - £295k. The impact on urgent and secondary care using secondary cost benefit analysis revealed total savings of at least £1.03m. Discharge surveys demonstrate the clinical and non-clinical time savings including enabling short visits, appointments, enabling earlier discharge and preventing referrals.

The Enhance model has attracted attention beyond Leeds. The programme has recently been a focus of three visits by a National Department of Social Care Team and has been the subject of an article recently published by British Geriatrics Society:

Brodie Clark CBE, presented the award to some of the Enhance Project Team and thanked the team saying, "It is an important and critical piece of work. Dealing with whole people, their circumstances and contexts. It's also important as it's the trigger for more relationships and partnerships with social care, with third sector, with other colleagues across the NHS system. It's looking at doing more work at a community level in the interest of the communities, and we need to be a voice in that and we need to be quite loud in reflecting how remarkably impactful that can be.

I recognise the leadership around this programme, the initiatives around the programme, the complexities around the programme and how you have dealt with all of that. A huge appreciation and my admiration to what you have done and how you have done it."

You can find out more about Enhance by watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDPtYakBroc