Our strategic priorities
Our strategy priorities have evolved through engagement with stakeholders and the communities we serve, and are drawn from:
- the two Health and Wellbeing Strategies, reflecting the needs identified in the Joint Strategic Needs Assessments
- national guidance about the design of ICSs and the development of Integrated Care Strategies
- key themes emerging from public and stakeholder engagement.
We have identified three overarching priorities that will drive our activity as a system over the next five years, with a number of key areas of focus within these. The strongest message we have heard in our public engagement has been about access to and trust in health and care services, and so we are committing to invest our energies in addressing this as one of our system priorities.
The other priorities reflect a shared understanding that there is both an immediate imperative to tackle specific burning issues around system capacity and resilience, and action we need to take now that will have an impact on population health long-term. It is by prioritising prevention across all we do that we have a real opportunity as an Integrated Care System to shift the dial on population health outcomes and inequalities.
Our priorities
The following diagram shows the nine areas of focus to support the delivery of these priorities, set in the context of our wider vision and aims.
As we have developed these priorities and identified the outcomes and actions for each, we have done so through the lens of our population health model. Whilst each is an important and distinct area of activity, we also seek to highlight the connections and overlaps between them. So, for example:
- personalised care gives power to people to live independently, take greater control of their own care and focus on “what matters to me?” rather than “what’s the matter with me?” This citizen empowerment is key to the prevention of ill health
- protecting the health of people and communities requires culturally competent approaches, which will be underpinned by a deeper understanding and involvement of our communities
- there are opportunities to address the wider determinants of health through our approach to workforce challenges, by recruiting locally and taking action to attract and prepare young people living in areas of deprivation for careers in health and care.
We are determined to see an unswerving commitment to reducing inequalities running through everything we do but have also included this as a specific area of focus, to ensure it is given the attention and scrutiny required to deliver progress and impact over time.
Our commitments
All partners in the system have signed up to the following set of commitments that will define how we work together to achieve the four national aims and our system priorities. These include an underpinning commitment to the primacy of place in our decision-making and activity, whilst recognising the opportunity of system-wide working to deliver value at scale where appropriate.
