Introduction

Delivering Health and Care in Coventry and Warwickshire

Our new Integrated Care System (ICS) was formalised on 1 July 2022, with the establishment of the new Integrated Care Board and statutory Integrated Care Partnership. One of the most important actions of our new ICS has been the development of this strategy, to set out how we will come together as partners to improve health, care and wellbeing for the people of Coventry and Warwickshire.

We are developing our Integrated Care Strategy at a time of enormous challenge for health and care systems up and down the country. The pressures we face are not unique to Coventry and Warwickshire, but their impact is affected by our local context. 

This strategy provides an opportunity for us to set out our ambitions for what we can achieve over the next five years as an ICS. It aims to outline, in high level terms, the difference we can make by working in an integrated way, taking advantage of a new legislative framework – and it sets the tone and focus for how we will work together. It doesn’t seek to replace or duplicate existing strategies and activity underway in the system – instead it seeks to link them together by providing an overarching narrative about where we want to get to, and what it is that we are all trying to change and improve together.

Importantly, this is about far more than health and care services. The Integrated Care System has an opportunity to improve population health and wellbeing in its broadest sense, with a wide range of partners working together to improve health outcomes and tackle health inequalities, starting with the root causes by addressing the wider determinants of health.

And equally importantly, this is about working together at all levels and as locally as possible. We intend that much of the activity to integrate care and improve population health will be driven by organisations working together in our places, and through multi-disciplinary teams working together in our neighbourhoods, adopting new targeted and proactive approaches to service delivery, informed by a shared understanding of the needs of our population.

The Covid-19 pandemic brought us together as partners in the face of urgent need and accelerated collaborative working. From protecting and supporting extremely clinically vulnerable people, to implementing vaccinations, to delivering testing, we worked together as partners and with our wider community in ways we hadn’t previously, recognising where public sector partners had a different role to play, empowering and facilitating where expertise and capability lies with our communities.  We now have an opportunity as an Integrated Care System to embed and build on these new ways of working together. The challenges we face now are no less urgent or significant, and demand just as much commitment and ambition in our response.

More patients than ever are accessing primary care appointments. However, in our engagement with local people we have heard, loud and clear, concerns about access to health services – especially primary care – and, increasingly, indications that trust in the NHS is beginning to erode.

These are difficult messages to hear, but as an Integrated Care Partnership we are determined to tackle them head on.

As the local Integrated Care Partnership, we are uniquely placed to address the challenges facing the health and care system in Coventry and Warwickshire, and to harness collective energy and resource to achieve our ambitions for the health and wellbeing of our population. We bring together a wide range of partners – local government, NHS, voluntary and community sector, housing, Healthwatch, universities and others, to lead the system’s activity on population health and wellbeing and drive the strategic direction and plans for integration across Coventry and Warwickshire. 

Our Integrated Care Strategy charts a path for how we will work together over the next five years to deliver our vision.

The Framework for our strategy

As we have transitioned to statutory ICS arrangements, The King’s Fund population health model has framed our ICS strategic direction and underpins an inclusive, integrated approach to health and wellbeing. Both Coventry and Warwickshire Health and Wellbeing Strategies  are based around this model, and it is embedded as our strategic approach right across the system. We are committed to ensuring that strategies and plans across our Integrated Care System consider each of these four components and – importantly – the connections between them. Our Integrated Care Strategy is equally driven by this approach.

The diagram below sets out the overall framework for our strategy and helps describe the approach we have taken in developing its content.

Our priorities and planned activity are driven by the national and local policy context (and guidance) for integration and our understanding of local population health needs as set out in the Joint Strategic Needs Assessments, informed by local Health and Wellbeing Strategies and embracing the role and contribution of a wide range of partners at Place. They also reflect what we’ve learned from listening to our communities.