System overview

To enable the delivery of the four core aims of the ICS, the strategic priorities shared across the Integrated Care Strategy and this plan, over the coming years, our system will transform in a way which moves decision making closer to communities, and supports collaboration between partners to improve outcomes, address inequalities, and sustain joined-up, value for money services.
 
The Health and Care Act 2022 and associated statutory guidance provide a clear mandate for a more joined-up approach to health and care built on collaboration and partnership working, using the collective resources of the local system, NHS, Local Authorities, the VCFSE sector, and others to improve the health of local areas. In this context, during 2022/23 there has been significant engagement between key stakeholders across Coventry and Warwickshire to think about how our system should develop and evolve over the next five years. The Health and Care Act gives us the necessary flexibility to change both the commissioning and delivery environment, moving away from traditional commissioning arrangements to allow responsibilities and budgets to be delegated to parts of the system that have the expertise and capability to transform services more effectively. 
 
Our intention is to:

Set the conditions to create greater collaboration, removing barriers to integrated care to allow local partnerships to thrive, and empowering staff and communities to deliver the ambitious service changes needed within the system;

Empower the right group of people with the expertise and capabilities to make decisions on how to redesign and reorganise services, including by transferring resources to allow Providers to take on more commissioning functions, with the ICB transitioning to a more strategic commissioning role; 

Take collective decisions closer to the patient, based on a shared understanding of the local population and how people live their lives in a system that looks beyond health and care services to the wider determinants that influence the health and wellbeing of local people and communities.
 
We recognise that our vision of a transformed health and care system comes alive by thinking about how the future system will operate differently to the current system, including how it will feel different for people working in the system and how relationships between organisations will change:

The end point that we are moving towards consists of:

An Integrated Care Partnership across Coventry and Warwickshire exists to align the ambitions, purpose and strategies of health, care and wider partners across the Coventry and Warwickshire ICS. It will facilitate joint action to improve health and care services, outcomes and experience through effective integration, and to influence the wider determinants of health and broader social and economic development. The Integrated Care Partnership has led the development of the Integrated Care Strategy, which sets the vision for integration and collaboration for the ICS, and will be responsible for monitoring the progress of delivery of the Strategy moving forward. 

The Integrated Care Board which has responsibility for the NHS budget for the whole population of Coventry and Warwickshire and leads the planning and commissioning of services, working closely with partners across the system and undertaking this role in compliance with a number of statutory duties. We describe how the Integrated Care Board will discharge some of its key statutory duties in the Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care Board sub-section. The Integrated Care Board has a key strategic role to play in leading health and care integration by bringing together all those involved in the planning and delivery of health and care services to take a collaborative approach.  By delivering effective commissioning at the right level across the health and care system, the Integrated Care Board will create an environment in which our system is focused on outcomes, our Collaboratives and Places are able to flourish, and the benefits of integrated care can be realised.  Working with its partner NHS Trusts, the Integrated Care Board has led the development of this plan to act as the shared health and care system delivery plan for the Integrated Care Strategy.

Six Collaboratives – organisations across our system are coming together to build effective collaborative arrangements. We describe the purpose and priorities of the different Collaboratives in the Collaboratives sub-section. We also demonstrate the key role that the different Collaboratives will play in delivering the overall aims and priorities set out in the Integrated Health and Care Strategy Delivery section of this plan.  

Four Places – the Places bring together health, care and wider partners, including District and Borough Councils and VCFSE Sector leaders and organisations, alongside local people and communities. We describe the role of the Places in the Delivering though our Places section of the plan and demonstrate how Place programmes and projects align to the three strategic priorities and nine areas of focus shared across the Integrated Care Strategy and this plan. 

Nineteen Primary Care Networks – as reflected in the Collaboration and Integration sub-section of this plan, supporting the development of local PCNs so that GP Practices harness the benefits of PCN participation and the PCNs are able to cement their role within Place based partnership and collaborative arrangements is a key priority for the Integrated Care Board. Our focus on PCN development recognises that the Networks will create the foundations for delivering well-functioning, integrated, community-based care, which is our local ambition, as well as the national ambition set out in the NHS Long Term Plan. 

As we recognise later in this section, clinical and care professional leadership will be vital to delivering meaningful, sustained change in our services and to ensuring quality and safety.  Our Philosophy of Care will be used to unite us across disciplines and sectors.  To build and develop our leaders, we will be delivering a System Leadership Development Programme that will be a catalyst to embolden our clinical and care leaders to work across organisations and develop the mindset of system thinking.  We will be developing our professional faculties and clinical networks to strengthen professional identities, improve collaborative working and empower our clinicians to provide robust leadership in service changes.  In particular, we will be establishing a Faculty of Clinical and Care Leadership to ensure a distributed pool of leadership is developed throughout our system and across different levels of experience.