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Local health and care organisations in Essex will work more closely together to make improvements for patients.

NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens yesterday announced in a speech at a major health conference that Essex would be one of 3 areas in England where local health and care organisations will work more closely together to make improvements for patients as part of the new Success Regime.

The regime is a collaboration between Trust Development Authority, Monitor and NHS England.

The NHS Five Year Forward View, published last year, set out a vision for the future of the NHS, including how it will need to evolve to meet the challenges of the future on health and wellbeing; care and quality; and funding and efficiency.

As part of this, it set out an ambition to start transforming services for the future and some organisations are already at the stage of piloting new models of care. But it also looks at what can be done to support those areas which still face challenges and where the conditions for transformation do not yet exist.

The Success Regime aims to help create the conditions for success in these challenged areas. Its purpose will be to protect and promote services for patients in local health and care systems that are struggling with financial or quality problems, or sometimes both. It will provide increased support and direction and aims to secure improvement in 3 main areas:

• short-term improvement against agreed quality, performance and financial metrics
• medium and longer-term transformation, including the application of new care models where appropriate
• developing leadership capacity and capability across the health system, ensuring collaborative working

Essex

Essex, alongside North Cumbria and North, East and West Devon, has been selected as one of the first 3 areas to take part in the Success Regime.

Mid Essex was one of 11 challenged health economies which received support with strategic planning in 2014/15 and the Success Regime will seek to build on this work and broaden it across the county. It will not replace any ongoing work – for example, Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust will remain in special measures and Monitor’s investigation into the Southend University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust’s finances (after the trust reported a deficit of £9.8 million for 2014/15) will continue.

The Success Regime will see all partners working together across Essex. This recognises that in order to solve the system-wide problems in Essex it is not appropriate to focus on one organisation but instead the focus needs to be across the whole health and care economy, fixing the problems together.

The health economy faces quality, financial and operational challenges which put the sustainability of health and care services at risk. As well as the financial situation across the whole health and care economy, it will also look at governance and other issues. Across Essex in particular there are workforce challenges across primary and secondary care in the local health economy. The Success Regime will aim to produce a single strategic plan for the local health and care system, shared by all local stakeholders.

The local community and patients will be able to engage in the work to improve their health and care system through the Success Regime and will be consulted if any major changes are suggested as a result of the work.

About the Success Regime

The Success Regime will seek to address deep-rooted and systemic issues that previous interventions have not tackled across the whole health and care economy. It provides local organisations with the means and opportunity to work together to improve services for patients and they will benefit from support and resource to achieve this.

The Success Regime will build upon existing approaches to providing support and challenge to local systems by working across whole health and care economies in a more joined-up way to fix the current problems rather than focussing on a single organisation when trying to solve systemic problems.

As well as identifying the issues and any changes required, it will provide both support and challenge to health and care organisations within Essex and work with them to implement any necessary changes. This will include working with organisations to develop and strengthen leadership, with a particular focus on leaders working together to drive improvements for patients and for their organisations.