Jordan Reid sat down with Caroline Rollings, wellbeing lead for the National Association of Primary Care, to find out about the work she’s been doing to support staff wellbeing in primary care.
The much-anticipated Hewitt Review into the oversight, governance and accountability of integrated care systems (ICSs) landed last week, to surprisingly little fanfare and a somewhat muted reception. To anyone that has followed the path of the review since its launch in November 2022, it will come as no surprise that it is both comprehensive in its breadth and that it draws on extensive engagement with the sector and key partners, for which the review team and its leadership should be given due credit. Reflecting this, the final document weighs in at a hefty 89 pages. So, standing back from the detail, what are the key take-aways?
The debate about whether general practice should be organised through an independent contractor model (GP partnerships) or whether it should be provided by staff salaried within an NHS organisation is as old as the NHS itself.
This report provides an overview of the key actions required to tackle barriers and challenges to better partnership working between integrated care systems (ICS) and the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector. It identifies ways of working that can help mitigate barriers and facilitate solutions, and systemic actions that can help embed and spread good practice.
As we publish our new report on addressing barriers to partnership working with the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector, Helen Gilburt takes a look at three fundamental principles needed to create change.
Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System (ICS), like many ICSs across England, wants to improve population health and tackle inequalities. Having articulated this aspiration and set up a Population Health and Health Equity Academy in May 2022, in partnership with The King’s Fund, it has taken the first steps to making this a reality by developing its primary care workforce. In this long read, we outline key aspects of the approach taken in Lancashire and South Cumbria, and share reflections that may help others undertaking a similar journey.
Aim: To determine the feasibility of a nurse-led, primary care-based comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA) intervention.
To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
In the past six months, there has been a rapid increase in the number of people experiencing delayed discharge from hospitals in England, with the number of patients remaining in hospital overnight who no longer meet the criteria to remain averaging 13,771 in February 2023. That’s up from 12,589 on average in April, an increase of 9.4 per cent.
Patricia Hewitt’s independent review of integrated care systems (ICSs) is aimed squarely at one of the biggest challenges facing ICSs – the strong culture of top-down performance management in the NHS. The reforms introduced by the 2022 Health and Care Act, with their focus on collaboration across boundaries in local systems, represent a direct challenge to this hierarchical culture, and without a new approach to accountability in the NHS there is little hope of ICSs living up to their original promise.
Social prescribing (SP) enables healthcare professionals to link patients with non-medical interventions available in the community to address underlying socioeconomic and behavioural determinants. We synthesised the evidence to understand the effectiveness of SP for chronic disease prevention. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
Homelessness, reoffending, addiction and poor physical and mental health are intrinsically linked, with each often the cause and effect of the other. With this in mind, partners across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight Integrated Care System (ICS) are looking at the link between reoffending and health and the role partner organisations, such as the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner, have to play in health inclusion.
Integrated care systems (ICSs) were established to create partnerships for population health, not simply to better manage existing patterns of NHS care. In many systems, statutory status has been accompanied by the creation of director, or similar, roles with titles that include population health. Roles intended sometimes to stimulate a reframing of work across the whole leadership team but elsewhere simply leading a standalone programme of work, often primarily analytical. How these emergent roles develop matters.
The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of first contact physiotherapists in primary care in south east Wales regarding the implementation, interprofessional collaboration and the facilitators and barriers to providing the service. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
In this article, the authors discuss the challenges associated with effective transition and describe their experience of implementing a healthcare transition pathway using a quality improvement model. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
This commentary is a response to three articles on integrated care systems in this journal. It explores some aspects of the latest transformation of England's National Health Service (NHS) and raises some questions on the extent to which the proposed NHS Long Term Plan can deliver on the current challenges. To read the full article, choose Open Athens “Institutional Login” and search for “Midlands Partnership”.
Blog post. The bold ambitions of integrated care systems (ICSs) to improve population health and tackle health inequalities, coupled with greater integration of health and care services, should definitely be a golden opportunity to do things differently and better. However, if ICSs want to prove that this is indeed a new era, they will need to act quickly to involve groups experiencing marginalisation and discrimination, including Disabled people.
Toby Lewis argues that we need to shift the debate about regions in health care from a vertical discussion within the NHS to a horizontal conversation about embedding the NHS in the wider world. If reducing health inequalities is to be the common purpose it ought to be, these new regions can play a crucial role.