Let’s embrace the integrated care systems (ICS) and what they aspire to when they go live on July 1. Integrated care is about improving quality for the people we support. Integrated care is defined as “I can plan my care with people who work together to understand me and my carer(s), allow me control, and bring together services to achieve the outcomes important to me”.

ELFT is in two integrated care systems - the Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Health and Care Partnership (BLMK) and the North East London Health and Care Partnership (NEL). We have countless examples in both systems of how our teams are already delivering to this definition.

In both ICSs ELFT’s community mental health teams are re-designing themselves around neighbourhoods and are working much more closely with the voluntary sector. In our enhanced primary care services there are fabulous examples of multi-disciplinary team working. Our community learning disability teams are integrated across health and social care and are working with GPs to develop more integrated physical health plans. Our integrated discharge hubs feature health and social care professionals working together to facilitate safe and timely discharge from hospital. Our children and young people’s community services team in Newham started extraordinary work during the pandemic to ensure families are supported across both health and social care. I could go on and on and on.

When the rubber meets the road, what matters is outcomes, and collaboration is yielding significantly better outcomes for the people we serve. Our mental health bed management collaborative has meant that NEL is the only London ICS that has not needed to send inpatients out of our local area to be hospitalized elsewhere. The work we have done across five trusts on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services has enabled children and young people in crisis to be supported more effectively and to reduce reliance on inpatient care. In BLMK clinicians are coming across trusts to vastly increase the provision of IAPT services. Also in BLMK a better pathway has been developed for people with serious mental illness who require supported housing or residential care.

With our organisational treasures - clinical leadership, quality improvement and people participation at the heart of our approach to integrated care, we have unlimited opportunities to deliver even more outstanding care to the people we serve and to fundamentally address the underlying social determinants of health.