Sutton Health and Wellbeing Board (HWB) has been proactive in driving and overseeing extensive developments in integration, prevention and tackling the wider determinants of health, and in holding partners to account. This case study forms part of our integrated care systems (ICS) resource.
The aim is to develop an ‘integrated care place partnership’ for Sutton to deliver health and care plan place-based ambitions for the borough. Sutton is making good progress towards becoming one of the earliest integrated care places in south west London.
The overarching vision of the Sutton Plan is for people to have a good quality of life and access to decent jobs and services. Developing a coherent, personalised system of health and care is a key chapter in the Sutton Plan. Recently, HWB partners undertook extensive joint work to refresh the joint health and wellbeing strategy (JHWS) and co-produce an implementation plan which puts greater emphasis on tackling the wider determinants of health, such as collaborating to tackle social isolation. This reflects the HWB’s long-term commitment to engaging with and supporting communities to create their own solutions.
Sutton is part of South West London Health and Care Partnership, which has a commitment to delegate to borough level to ensure local accountability and delivery based on consistency, not uniformity. The partners in South West London published draft health and care plans in March 2019. The health and care plan for Sutton is building on the JHWS, taking a life course approach and focusing on the wider determinants of health, while deepening health and care integration.
A local transformation board operates as an executive to the HWB to oversee integration, with all partner chief executives, including the voluntary and community sector, represented. This is likely to evolve into a formal place partnership executive body reporting to the HWB and the integrated care system.
A key development has been the Sutton Health and Care at Home integrated provider alliance. This was jointly commissioned in 2018 as a contractual joint venture to deliver on the HWB priority of enabling people to live well in their own homes. The alliance covers NHS providers, the London Borough of Sutton and Sutton GP Federation, and aims to reduce non-elective admissions and enable patients to be discharged safely from hospital as quickly as possible. Performance indicators are already improving despite growing demand, and compare favourably with comparator areas:
“The London Borough of Sutton has shown just what can be achieved when everybody in the system works together to support joined-up care”
Professor Steve Field, former Chief Inspector of Primary Care Services, Care Quality Commission
- non-elective admission for over 65s – reduced by 1 per cent
- length of stay for over 65s – reduced by 6 per cent
- average length of stay in hospital – reduced by 5 per cent
- local indicator on proportion of older people remaining at home 91 days after reablement – continues to increase year on year with a current target of 95 per cent.
Work is taking place to further develop joint commissioning and delivery through trialling three interlinked initiatives, all aimed at early intervention and shifting care into the community:
- multi-disciplinary locality teams and the development of locality hubs
- social prescribing through new primary care networks, working with voluntary and community sector information and advice providers
- population health analytics using combined health and care databases to proactively identify at-risk patients.
For more information
Jessica Crowe, Assistant Director, Customers, Commissioning and Governance
[email protected]