Joining up health and care

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Our local health and care system must adapt to meet  rising demand for services as a result of people living longer and with more complex conditions.

We need to break down the barriers between our different health and care organisations and make sure they provide a more joined up and better coordinated service for people.  So in common with many other parts of the country, we are looking at how we can work with our partner organisations to bring all our resources together to provide the best quality care and health outcomes for our local population.

Click on the tabs above to learn more about our merger with NHS Swindon CCG and NHS Wiltshire CCG, as well as the different ways we are forming partnerships with other health and care organisations to better meet the needs of our local population now and in the future. There is also more information available on the NHS England website here.

This infographic explains some of the reasons why the NHS needs to change so it is more joined-up, proactive and empowering:

On the 1 April 2020, Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group (BSW CCG) will officially take the place of the three individual CCGs that currently exist.

The new, single CCG will serve a population of 934,000 people with 94 member (GPs) practices. It will be responsible for £1.3bn of core NHS funding each year.

The three current CCGs have a shared history of working together effectively to deliver high quality care. They have already established a single executive management structure to provide more consistent leadership and direction to staff working across the three organisations.

NHS England approved the CCGs’ application to merge in October 2019 following an extensive stakeholder engagement programme in July and August. Tracey Cox was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the new CCG in February 2019 and is leading the transition.

The merger will ensure that local people continue to have access to the services they need, where they need them but it will reduce variation in care and standardise best practice, so that everyone in the region receives high quality treatment, regardless of where they live. Working as one organisation will also help the CCG meet financial challenges through offering greater buying power, eliminating the duplication of administrative support functions and streamlining governance processes, which means we can invest more of our budget into frontline services or transformational projects.

In January 2019, The NHS Long Term Plan was published.  The plan sets out the need for people to take more responsibility for their own health and wellbeing and CCGs play a strategic role in supporting everyone to do this. As ‘transformers of the system’, CCGs need to lead the way to transform local health and care services. They must work as high level decision makers and purchasers of local services, holding the providers of these services to account. As a single organisation, BSW CCG will be better placed to do this.

There is still work to be done before 1 April; not least the recruitment of some key roles to the governing board. At the end of January all posts should be filled and the organisational structure will be published.

The teams at all three CCGs are working together to safely transition colleagues and contracts to the new organisation and create new ways of working.

We are building on several years of successful collaboration with Bath and North East Somerset Council to plan, commission (buy) and deliver local health and care services together. During 2018/19 we are making changes to our governance processes and team structures that will enable us to work together in a more integrated way that is still consistent with each organisation’s separate statutory duties. This will mean pooling more of our local health and care budget and planning and delivering services that are better coordinated  to meet the needs of local people.

There are a number of factors that impact on our health and wellbeing, besides access to and quality of NHS and social care services.  Housing, transport and education, for example, all play a part in determining how healthy we are. The integration of health and care services will help our commissioners to work more closely with other Council departments. A new Health and Care Board has been formed to take decisions informed by the collective experience of GPs, local Councillors and senior offices from both organisations. The Board will meet in public for the first time on 6 March 2019 and the agenda and papers are available on the Council website here.

Useful link:

Integrated commissioning for better outcomes a commissioning framework from the Local Government Association and NHS Clinical Commissioners.

All health and social care organisations across Bath & North East Somerset (B&NES), Swindon and Wiltshire are working together as a sustainability and transformation partnership (STP) to improve our local population’s health and wellbeing, improve service quality and deliver financial stability.

Tracey Cox, interim Senior Responsible Officer for BSW STP said: “We have a number of key priorities, in particular the transformation of services to ensure the well-being of older people, the transformation of mental health provision and a sound financial plan to ensure we can deliver savings whilst sustaining services.”

We have also been exploring how we can work more closely with Swindon and Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Groups to commission services ‘at scale.’  More information about these plans are available in our Board papers here.

For more information about our STP, visit www.bswstp.nhs.uk

Senior leaders from local health and care organisations in Bath and North East Somerset Council are now working closer together to take collective responsibility for managing the local health and care budget and making quality improvements to local services.   Alongside the CCG, members of the Alliance Board include representatives from:

• Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust
• B&NES Council
• The Royal United Hospitals NHS Trust
• Virgin Care
• Healthwatch and representatives from primary care (GP staff) and the voluntary sector.