Today marks the official first day of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System, the partnership of health and care organisations working together across Hampshire and Isle of Wight to better join up services to improve the health and wellbeing of people in the communities we serve.
This is a significant moment and provides an opportunity for us to truly transform local health and care. We join together as one team focused on improving the health and care for all those living in Hampshire and Isle of Wight.
The Integrated Care Board (ICB) sits within the ICS and is responsible for developing a plan to meet the health needs of our population and the NHS budget, and replaces Hampshire, Southampton and Isle of Wight Clinical Commissioning Group and Portsmouth Clinical Commissioning Group. Hampshire and Isle of Wight is one of 42 ICBs across England.
While the NHS has worked successfully in partnership with other organisations to deliver health and care services in the past, there have been barriers to that, preventing us from really making the most of those relationships.
Moving to an integrated care system removes those barriers. Instead of health and care organisations being in competition for resources and working separately for patients, we can now come together in a far more collaborative way to support people’s health and wellbeing as a system.
There are four key principles guiding our integrated care system –
The work we undertake together will be guided by these four principles as we head towards our vision that – together, we will deliver care that is among the best in the world.
In Portsmouth, this will be delivered through Health and Care Portsmouth – our partnership of organisations already working together to make health and social care better. Building on our progress to date, we will continue to work in partnership to help ensure our system thrives and in doing so, enables people in the communities we serve to live longer, healthier lives.
This is an exciting opportunity to really transform the way we all work, and to help improve the way we deliver health and care to people – but development continues well beyond 1 July.
Partners from across the local health and care system explain what these changes mean to them in this video: Launching Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System – YouTube
