ST Helens Council may need to take some “brave decisions” over the next year, one of the borough’s health chiefs has said.

Professor Sarah O’Brien, the council’s strategic director of people’s services, appeared before the overview and scrutiny commission this week to update members on the progress of St Helens Cares.

The new social care system, which will look to save St Helens Council £80 million by 2020, is set to launch later this year.

One of the key objectives of St Helens Cares – which recently received national recognition at the Municipal Journal (MJ) Achievement Awards 2018 – is to deliver integrated health and social care.

The vision for the new system is to split St Helens into four geographical locations – North, South, Haydock and Newton and Town Centre.

Prof O’Brien, who is also the clinical accountable officer for St Helens CCG, said this has been done to make communities more “resilient”.

She said: “I think if we’re really going to prevent demand on statutory services or demand on health, we have to have more prevention work going on in the community.

“So, the whole idea of the localities was to make them more resilient.”

Prof O’Brien went on to say the council may have to think about reinvesting money into preventative work.

The health boss acknowledged to members that non-statutory services may have been cut “too close to the bone”.

“We might have to take a step back and take some brave decisions over the next year about reinvesting some of our precious money back into some preventative stuff because I think without that the demand just goes up,” she said.

“And I think possibly, we’ve cut too much to the bone on some of the stuff that isn’t statutory, but longer term all that does is put demand on statutory anyway.”

The former nurse added that the council does not currently harness the voluntary sector as well as it could.

Cllr Michael Haw, ward councillor for Eccleston, asked whether the council had taken notice of Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) health devolution deal.

The Liberal Democrat councillor asked if the council was working with Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCRCA) to see if similar outcomes can be reached in Merseyside.

Prof O’Brien said the “elephant in the room” was the level of funding that GMCA received from the Government as part of the deal.

She told members that Wigan received £10 million of transformational funding from the GMCA pot to fund work around community resilience.

But she told members she understood the deal was a “one off” and also claimed LCRCA has not “embraced” health in the same way Greater Manchester has.

“One of the challenges for us and the rest of Cheshire and Merseyside is – we need to do some of the work that areas like Wigan have done in terms of investing in the community – but we’re not going to be given that level of money,” she said.

Caroline Barlow, deputy director of finance and HR, said the council took a “leap of faith” and has already invested money from its reserves to kick-start St Helens Cares.

She said: “We talk a lot about how we compare with the devo Manc deal and the millions they got in transformation.

“And I would argue that we’ve done more without anything than a lot of our partners across the Manchester area have with all of the money that they got.”