The NHS North Central London Integrated Care Board (ICB) is responsible for allocating NHS budget and commissions services. ICBs are a key change in the Health and Care Bill, and have replaced Clinical Commissioning Groups. These changes came into effect on 1 July 2022.
Integrated Care Boards are a statutory NHS organisations responsible for developing a plan for meeting the health needs of the population, managing the NHS budget and arranging for the provision of health services in the ICS area.
NCL ICB will build on existing commitments, programmes and ambitions. The principles informing the work of the ICB are:
- Taking a population health approach: We need to continue to develop the way we plan services to take into account the needs of people and communities, acknowledging the wider determinants of health. This will support tackling health inequalities across and within the communities we serve.
- Evolving how we work with communities: Embedding co-design with partners and communities in planning and designing services, and developing systematic approaches to communications and community engagement.
- Continued focus on boroughs: Partnership working within boroughs is essential to enable the integration of health and care and to ensure provision of joined up, efficient and accessible services for residents.
- Learning as a system: We have learnt a lot as a system throughout both our response to COVID-19 and our efforts to recover. Capturing this learning across primary care, social care, community, mental health and hospital services will guide our next steps for both individual services and system approaches.
- Acting as a system to deliver a sustainable health and care system: Providing high quality services enabled by workforce, finance strategy, estates, digital and data.
The key responsibilities are below.
Developing a Plan
To meet the health needs of the population within their area, having regard to the Partnership’s Strategy. This will include ensuring NHS services and performance are restored following the pandemic, in line with national operational planning requirements, and Long-Term Plan commitments are met.
Allocating Resources
To deliver the plan across the system, including determining what resources should be available to meet the needs of the population in each place and setting principles for how they should be allocated across services and providers (both revenue and capital). This will require striking the right balance between enabling local decision-making to meet specific needs and securing the benefits of standardisation and scale across larger footprints, especially for more specialist or acute services.
Establishing joint working arrangements
With partners that embed collaboration as the basis for delivery of joint priorities within the plan. The ICS NHS body may choose to commission jointly with local authorities, including the use of powers to make partnership arrangements under section 75 of the 2006 Act and supported through the integrated care strategy, across the whole system; this may happen at place where that is the relevant local authority footprint.
Establishing Governance arrangements
To support collective accountability between partner organisations for whole-system delivery and performance, underpinned by the statutory and contractual accountabilities of individual organisations, to ensure the plan is implemented effectively within a system financial envelope set by NHS England and NHS Improvement.