Suffolk & North East Essex Integrated Care System

In Suffolk and North East Essex we are genuinely ‘Can Do’ in the way that we work together as a local health and care system.

Our primary ambition is enabling ’Health Equality for Everyone’ and as a system we are continually ‘Thinking Differently Together’, with an approach that ‘Starts with Why?’.

We are moving away from using performance targets as the measure of our system success, towards a far more powerful context that places families and communities at the heart of what we do. We believe that the markers of how well our system is working should be ‘whole system’, for example school readiness or preventing teenagers from developing eating disorders; protecting adults who are at risk of homelessness; supporting our elderly from being alone or becoming isolated.

We believe that as a system we also need to work positively on the wider determinants of health, whether that is social issues, deprivation, inequalities or mental health, for example. One-off interventions by specialists are no longer enough, we need to enable people to effectively manage their own lives and health and to help each other. We know that this means moving beyond individual health and care organisations working alone, to working together in an integrated way because that is the best route to helping people to thrive.

Together we are passionate in our conviction that we must encourage and develop leadership across our system to deliver genuinely integrated care in our communities. It is in this way that we will enable people to have the courage and imagination to think differently and make a positive impact for everyone. Our system is underpinned by increasingly strong and positive relationships between local health and care leaders, courageous joint action to address problems when they emerge and a genuine ‘Can Do’ attitude that enables meaningful partnership and integrated thinking and working at every level of our local health and care system.