Name: Annette Lear
Job: Care manager
Salary: £24,000
Born and brought up on the south coast, social worker Annette Lear has never thought of living anywhere else but Bournemouth.
"I'd recommend it to anyone," she says. "We've got the sea, the New Forest and it's close enough to London if you feel the need to go to a big city."
Forty-four year old Lear has another reason for staying: she has just started a job in a pilot rehabilitation project aimed at preventing elderly people from having to go into hospital or into residential care.
Under the scheme run by the Bournemouth primary care trust (PCT), elderly people are rehabilitated in the Aucklands residential home, a privately run home in Bournemouth, where they can stay up to six weeks. The trust pays for three beds in the home where patients receive care and support from a care and rehabilitation team that includes a doctor, two nurses, an occupational therapist, and a psychiatrist, as well as Lear.
The PCT has a further seven beds in a social services home which it shortly hopes to increase to accommodate 16 people. The aim of expanding the number of rehabilitation beds is to enable elderly people to leave hospital earlier or to receive short-term residential care if they are not managing at home.
It's a new way of working and one that Lear evidently enjoys. "Before, elderly people were assessed and it could take weeks to go through the process of referrals to occupational therapists and physios. Now they have access to the help they need straight away." LJ
