42 Suffolk and North East Essex ICS | ‘Our Journey Together’ Building relationships also means being willing to invest in people and communities. In Suffolk and North East Essex the Realising Ambition programme which began in 2019 invested £2 million of ICS transformation funding into hyper-local groups who were supporting their communities to live healthier lives. The Community Ambition and CORE20PLUS Connectors programmes that then followed from 2021 to 2025 also supported small organisations to identify need and support diverse ethnic communities to improve their access to health and care services. Feedback from these programmes has been uniformly positive in improving access to services for seldom heard and easily ignored communities. However these programmes have now ceased due to lack of external funding. ICS partners have also developed skills and expertise in co-production with local people and groups, through patient and public involvement, and embedding co-production into commissioning and procurement. The ICB’s iMatter maternity programme co-produces ways to tackle inequalities in maternity outcomes for parents and children, and the Women’s Health programme’s insight and oversight group contribute to the development and monitoring of the programme. Stakeholders told us that co-production has enabled people to meet commissioners as equals, but cautioned that there remains no common agreed understanding of what co-production is, and that leaders often start co-production at a late stage in service development. The wider health and care system is extensive, and people’s needs are diverse, making the design, delivery and funding of high-quality personalised health and care very challenging. The principle of subsidiarity, focusing action locally wherever possible, has been important in identifying where decisions and actions should happen system-wide, in places, in neighbourhoods, or in even smaller hyper-local areas. However, stakeholders told us that despite the principle of subsidiarity there remains variation across Suffolk and North East Essex in the degree to which assessors and providers have come together with the right resources to integrate care and developed responsive systems in local areas. Sharing power as local anchor institutions The outcome-based approach in Suffolk and North East Essex recognised that people’s health and wellbeing is not determined only by the delivery of health and care services, but also the wider socio-economic and environmental factors. So we need to think even more widely about how the NHS and other partners can make a positive local impact on health and wellbeing. There has been a growing recognition within the ICB and wider NHS that they do not have all the expertise needed on an issue and are not always the right organisation to find or fund solutions to problems. But the NHS has recognised that it is important to play its part in tackling the wider determinants of health. For example, the Suffolk and North East Essex anchors programme has contributed to ensuring that NHS partners in the ICS deliver on their duty to support broader social and economic development. The ICB has also focused major NHS capital investment and actively created new employment opportunities in the most deprived areas of Suffolk and North East Essex. Picture – Suffolk and North East Essex ICB and ICP staff receiving awards from charity African Families in the UK for working positively with local communities, 2023 Suffolk and North East Essex ICS Anchors Programme Board Impact Report: Our Actions on Procurement and Community Sharing our Learning and Good Practice April 2025
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA4ODM=