Abstract

The Partnerships for Older People Projects (POPP) is a £60m programme led by the UK Department of Health to establish a number of innovative pilot projects to test the effectiveness of different models of preventative approaches. The aim is to assist the wider health and social care community make the strategic shift towards prevention, which UK government policy now sees as a priority. The POPP programme is seen as a very important test bed for the preventative shift that the UK wider health and social care community is expected to make in future years. There is a particular commitment to extracting the learning from a range of project pilots and disseminating this as effectively as possible to the wider health and social care community. The first round of the POPP programme started in 2006 where 19 partnership bids were selected from a field of 144 bids that were received. Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) was selected as the evaluator for the two year POPP programme run in Knowsley, Merseyside near to Liverpool, UK. This paper examines the opportunity to test a range of different approaches for making a systemic and sustainable shift towards prevention with reference to the Knowsley case. These approaches encompass a range of new models of service and mental health areas, all of which are potentially replicable and all of which are designed to shift the balance of services away from high level needs towards earlier, preventative interventions.