Lancashire Child and Family

Since 2019, HCRG Care Group has delivered the Healthy Child Programme across Lancashire, bringing health visitors, school nurses and safeguarding specialists together with local partners through Family Hubs. We are expanding mandated health reviews, investing upfront in the quality of the workforce and launching a new digital front door – codesigned with young people who are increasingly shaping our services directly.

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Lancashire Child and Family

Since 2017, HCRG Care Group has been working as a service leader with local authority, health, and third sector partners to offer the Healthy Child Programme, and integrated 0-19 services based out of 56 neighbourhood centres across Lancashire, so joined-up care is available close to home.

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Services include:

  • A Single Point of Access (SPA) for care coordination
  • A digital front door for self-support, easier access to services and triage
  • Health visiting and school nursing, with eight mandated reviews
  • Community clinics across 56 neighbourhood centres
  • Weekly secondary school drop-ins and monthly primary school drop-ins
  • Safeguarding specialists and dedicated Looked After Children team

This service is led by

Robert Flack

Regional Director

Having undertaken leadership roles in the commercial, not for profit, social enterprise and NHS sectors, Robert now works to continuously improve our teams, relationships and services at HCRG Care Group.

The original five mandated health visiting reviews are becoming eight

Adding new checks at 3-4 months, 6 months and 3-3.5 years. Parents have told us that seeing the same health visitor each time helps build stronger relationships, and we are going to ensure every mother and child has access to a named health visitor or visiting team. With an exception made on a case-by-case basis for the 6-month review, all child health checks and reviews will be face to face.

Our school nursing service is evolving to have greater availability

With weekly drop-ins in every secondary school and monthly sessions in primary schools. And we’re limiting the maximum primary age children on roll per nurse, so that the quality of service provision can remain high, in line with our Quality Promise.

We’re investing in a new digital front door

The Lancashire Health Visiting and School Nursing app will provide parents and carers with age-specific advice and guidance (from breastfeeding and safe sleep to school readiness and adolescent health), with links to system partners and, crucially, a messaging service to contact health visitors directly – and even access virtual appointments. Though people will still be able to call our single point of access if they don’t want to or can’t access digital provision.

We’re embedding the voices of children and young people more into every aspect of service delivery

For instance, we’ve been co-designing digital services with a dedicated youth panel (aged 14–15).Their feedback is shaping how the brand and content looks and feels, and we’ll continue to consult them on more areas where digital meets service design.

We’re working closely with VCFSEs to integrate them with service provision

For the first time in Lancashire, we’re setting up a dedicated fund in each locality to support voluntary, community and faith sector organisations.

A key partnership is with Child Action Northwest, who are building lower level emotional health and wellbeing support for school-aged children. Some of our staff have transferred to their organisation to deliver this work as their specialist focus.

We’re doubling down on agile working

All staff are going to be equipped with laptops and phones, enabling flexible and mobile working. We’re also downsizing underused offices in favour of co-location in Family Hubs alongside partners, so we can be more visible with our partners and invest the saved costs elsewhere.

The quality of our workforce is another priority

We are investing upfront in training programmes that support nurses to progress into specialist roles such as health visiting and school nursing, and we will substantially increase the number of health visitors to meet projected local needs.

Looking ahead

We’re going to be increasing our focus on improving public health outcomes over outputs. Future phases of our Lancashire Health Visiting and School Nursing app will add online appointment booking, Ages & Stages questionnaires, and automation to reduce administration for clinicians.

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What’s happening at a glance

Launching a new digital front door with advice, resources and virtual appointments, co-designed with young people.

Funding for voluntary, community and faith sector organisations to strengthen local delivery.

Upfront investment in specialist training to increase health visitor numbers to meet future demand

Downsizing existing workplaces in favour of co-location in Family Hubs to improve visibility and integration with partners.

Our partners for this service