Supporting integrated care

Across England, the quality of care delivered by NHS services can be variable. Over time, patients’ needs have changed and pressure on the NHS has increased. In 2014, NHS England published the ‘Five Year Forward View’, which called for the integration of primary and acute care; physical and mental health services; and health and social care. Taking this approach will enable patients to gain greater control of their own care and break down the traditional barriers to how care is provided.

In response to the ‘Five Year Forward View’ many local areas are seeking to develop a community based health and care offer for their populations. To enable this change, local leaders need to co-create new care models with their communities and draw upon local assets that support integrated service delivery around their local populations needs.

UCLPartners is partnering with The Dartmouth Institute to deliver a Place-Based Care Network programme to eight teams from North Central London (NCL) and North-East London (NEL) Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs).

Through eight interactive workshops, participants are developing essential capabilities to support the development of integrated care partnerships and locality based care models. The teams are each comprised of six members with representation from GPs, commissioners, local authority leaders, social care providers, acute trust clinicians, public health and service users. The workshops introduce these teams to evidence based tools, measures and resources and they are supported to use these throughout the sessions to help design, plan and operationalise their new care models.

The workshops begin with site visits to ensure the facilitators understand the local context for each team. Learning materials are then tailored to the team’s needs. Teams are also visited after the workshops to understand what learnings, tools and measures have been most helpful and how they are being used.

The first six workshops have been delivered to the teams. The level of engagement that participants demonstrated has been very high. The cohort shared ideas throughout the workshops on the design of their new care models and the steps they have taken towards implementation.

As a result of the workshops that have been delivered teams have:

• Fed back that the space to engage with the materials and share ideas of new care models was highly beneficial.
• Expressed a strong desire to sustain a network with other participants after the programme.
• Expanded their thinking about their logic for measurement to ensure their projects are developing ‘fast and frugal’ measures to mark implementation progress.
• Focused on extended and new workforce roles to support new ways of working and to expand engagement time with patients, ensuring treatment preferences are understood and taken into account in service delivery.
• Gained confidence in their ability to design, commission and deliver new integrated care models in their localities.