READING children’s centres are at the heart of a groundbreaking new plan to reach out and provide more support to youngsters and families.

Health bosses gave the green light to a new steering group to look at ways of sharing information about services and to signpost children and families between GPs and Reading’s 13 children’s centres.

The project is a collaboration between Reading Borough Council and the area’s two Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) and aims to build upon the work of Health Visitors who help children’s centre staff support the children and families who visit them. Speaking at the council’s Health And Wellbeing Board meeting on Friday

Dr Elizabeth Johnston, chairwoman of South Reading CCG, highlighted that not enough GPs or healthworkers know where their local centre is, let alone what services were available.

She added: “There is a large gap in awareness of the services that are provided by children’s centres and we want to be able to signpost our patients better. There is a sense that there is a lot of information, but how do our families access it?”

Work has already begun to produce a comprehensive online children and families resource directory and to link children’s centres to their local GP surgeries.

Borough children and families leader Cllr Jan Gavin immediately volunteered to join the group and added: “I welcome this report and am really excited about this opportunity we have.

“It doesn’t really matter which front door people choose to walk through, families should be able to find the information they require and it is for us to make that happen.”

Services offered by

children’s centres will be promoted through GPs, including established groups like ante-natal and post-natal support. The new steering group will also explore the possibility of using children’s centres to improve the borough’s rates of immunisation, and Dr Johnston added: “Immunisation is an area we want to do better with and explore if we could use the

children’s centres more to reach those difficult families.”