25 March 2021 – Mental Health Network – governance during the COVID-19 pandemic webinar

This week’s webinar featured a discussion with Patrick Fraher and Laurel Fine from the NHSE’s provider policy team about the white paper, touching on the overall implementation plan, board membership and associated governance.

Due to Easter, the mental health network webinars will take a week’s break, so there will be no meeting on Thursday 1 April. It will return from Thursday 8 April.

In the weeks ahead, the following guest speakers will join our webinars.

• On 15 April, Beatrice Fraenkel and Michael Wood, Head of Health Economic Partnerships at the NHS Confed, will be leading a session around NHS organisations as anchor institutions and links to place-based care.
• On 22 April, Habib Naqvi, Director of the NHS Race and Health Observatory, will join to share and discuss the work of the Observatory.

Overheard during this week’s webinar:

“The process of moving to a statutory footing is an opportunity to redefine care around a person, including a focus on population health and improved outcomes through increased co-production. To move at pace on the issue of data and analytics, we need to support other providers and boards to upskill. […] In the bill, is there potential for further data to be shared between providers and GPs to help understand the population and their needs?”

“The proposal for ICSs is to develop a statutory NHS body which can channel money to place, and it’s correct that local authority status hasn’t changed. What the Department of Health has done is create the health and care partnership board, which will need to have been taken account of by the ICS statutory board. This is an attempt to localise one half of health and social care around the NHS, but accepting that how local authorities engage will vary across the country.”

“We’re keen to see collaboratives encompass neighbourhood (district and borough council) based collaboratives building on the integrated locality partnerships which are multi-agency. I don’t see how we can impact on some of the key objectives regarding population health and inequalities without proper joint working with housing, education, 3rd sector, police etc. at that level. So I hope the collaboratives aren’t seen as just NHS with a bit of social care thrown in.”

“On capital spending, there is a risk that mental health gets marginalized within the allocation of an ICS. There is an enormous stock of potential projects that are needed to update the mental health estate, with many across the country very out of date and doesn’t provide a therapeutic environment. Is there thinking to ensure mental health gets it fair share of capital spending.”

“NHSE are being more stringent around capital given their role in relation to systems. The Treasury want to see greater control over capital, which is why the bill has been developed in the way it has. There is the potential for a bidding war within an ICS and it needs to be understood what is going to happen.”

This is a great opportunity to mandate parity of esteem, rather than leave it to individual ICSs. Individuals have both physical and mental health and this should be considered in building the system. They have mental health, physical health and research integrated together which has been positive, but this has been because of the role of the mental health trust on the board.”

These meetings are by invitation only. For further details, visit our website https://www.good-governance.org.uk/events/

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions about these webinars, please contact: events@good-governance.org.uk