North East London NHS
Collaboration in North East London
The North East London integrated care system (ICS) is a broad partnership, brought together by a single purpose: to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for the people of North East London.
Each partner has an impact on the people of North East London – some providing care, others involved in planning services, and others impacting on wider determinants of health and care, such as housing and education.
Continuous improvement
The partnership between local people and communities, the NHS, local authorities and the voluntary sector, is uniquely positioned to improve all aspects of health and care including the wider determinants.
With hundreds of health and care organisations serving more than two million local people, it is important to make sure that we are utilising each to the fullest and ensure that work is done and decisions are made at the most appropriate level. Groups of partners coming together within partnerships are crucial building blocks for how we will deliver. Together they play critical roles in driving the improvement of health, wellbeing, and equality for all people living in North East London.
Who we are
Across North East London we come together through three core structures to collaborate to fulfil our core mission – through the ICS at North East London level (comprising the Integrated Care Partnership, Integrated Care Board and wider partnership), though our provider collaboratives, and through our places bringing together our trusts, primary care, local authorities and others at Borough level.
The NEL acute provider collaborative (APC) was established in August 2022 and brings together Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, Barts Health NHS Trust, Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and the NEL Integrated Care Board (NEL ICB). It aims to enable resilient acute hospitals to provide improved, sustainable and safe care to the population of North East London now and into the future, as three acute Trusts, eight hospitals and the ICB working together with all our partners for the benefit of our patients and communities. The purpose, scope, governance and leadership of the APC have been recently refreshed and formalised in a Partnership Agreement approved by the four boards in July 2024.
We believe that by working together as an APC we can deliver better results:
- For our Patients, ensuring faster access to better care for all our communities by optimally utilising our shared assets
- For our People, by being outstanding, inclusive places to work with more opportunities to develop meaningful careers
- With our Partners, particularly at Place, by sharing and learning we can accelerate our work together for our local communities acting to reduce health inequalities
For 2024/25 the APC has set three strategic priorities with associated outcomes measures: delivering high quality clinical services, accelerating access to care, and implementing a sustainable financial model. Each priority is led by a Group or Trust CEO and governed through a joint committee of the four boards.
In addition to collaborating through the APC, each Trust is a member of one or more borough-level place-based partnerships. These are the spaces where decisions about local services can be taken, with involvement from service users and local communities. These partnerships enable the principle of subsidiarity to be carried out through a delegation of functions from NEL ICB. This means they must have strong links to service users and communities. Each place has a set of local priorities and a local place leader – in some cases the hospital chief executive fulfils this function.
Our hospitals are core members of place work and form an important part of each Trust’s contribution to creating better health and wellbeing and sustainable health and care services for local people.
Your role
Through their personal leadership and significant commitment of time the Trust Chair will drive both horizontal and vertical collaboration, ensuring that the organisation is a trusted and effective partner. They will contribute to the wider system integration and collaboration.
At place, the Chair will:
- develop the role of the hospitals as anchor institutions in the broadest sense
- ensure the hospitals collaborate effectively with partners within the ICS, both to deliver effective healthcare for the present and to plan for the future to meet the needs of an expanding, changing and diverse population
- build wider supportive stakeholder relationships
In addition through the APC, the Chair will:
- drive the delivery through collaboration of high quality clinical services, accelerated access to care and sustainable financial performance
- Set the leadership culture for effective collaboration