11 Suffolk and North East Essex ICS | ‘Our Journey Together’ Picture – Ed Garratt and Maddie Baker-Woods after new ICS governance arrangements were agreed, 2019 England recommended a new Health and Care Bill to support integration, with the triple aim of better health for people, higher quality care, and financial sustainability for the NHS. In Suffolk and North East Essex, throughout 2019 development of an ICS Governance Framework was led by a design panel of system leaders supported by Matthew Kershaw from The King’s Fund and Susannah Howard as ICS Programme Director. The framework described the ICS aims, principles and core outcome-based methodology. It also described the nature of the system as being that of an organic ‘ecosystem’ rather than a ‘structure’ and underlined the importance of partners being pragmatic and working together at neighbourhood, place, system or county level as needed. Early in the year, Nick Hulme stood back from his role as ICS Executive Lead and for a period of time the chairs of the Health and Wellbeing Boards in Suffolk, Cllr. Goldson and Essex, Cllr. Spence, stepped in to chair the Suffolk and North East Essex ICS Board. Following a lengthy national process to recruit Independent ICS Chairs across the country, Professor Will Pope was appointed as ICS Independent Chair and Ed Garratt was appointed as ICS Executive Lead and Chief Executive of all three CCGs. In September 2019 the ICS conference ‘Thinking Differently’ took place at Wherstead Park, Suffolk. The conference focused in particular on health inequalities and the contribution that community and neighbourhood partners could make to improving health and wellbeing outcomes. The conference outputs informed development of the ICS Five Year System Strategic Planx to implement the NHS Long Term Planix and deliver its own ‘Higher Ambitions’. The plan was described by NHS England as possibly the best example of an ICS System Strategic Plan in the country. Planned national publication of all Five Year System Strategic Plans in March 2020 was paused because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Early in 2020 The Marmot Review ’10 Years On’xi highlighted the continuing impacts of societal inequalities on people’s health and wellbeing which were to worsen still further in the following years. Picture – a ‘snow storm’ created by delegates at the ‘Thinking Differently’ conference in September 2019
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