Next week our Board will be making a decision about the future structure and configuration of the North Central London Integrated Care Board in the best interests of serving local residents, patients and service users.
A range of options will be considered, including a full merger with North West London (NWL) Integrated Care Board, which will also be making a similar decision at its own board.
Both organisations are required to deliver within a significantly reduced budget, requiring approximately 50% cuts.
NCL and NWL have been working together in recent months to explore the potential benefits of operating at greater scale, with increased collaboration, in different forms, or a full legal merger into a new single entity, as the best ways to continue providing high quality services for patients and local residents.
The Board papers – for NCL and NWL respectively – have now been published and are available to view.
For NCL the options paper is here and the rest of the board papers are available here.
For NWL their options paper is here, with the rest of their board papers here.
The options appraisals set out a range of potential approaches including:
- Remaining as two stand-alone ICBs – developing our approaches and all corporate functions separately. In this option we would keep, as we have now an informal collaborative approach.
- Clustering – where we remain two legally separate organisations with separate leadership, strategic commissioning, processes and accountability but have joint corporate functions, including senior appointments, that would provide some economies of scale and greater access to specialist expertise in these shared areas.
- Merger – where our two organisations legally merge to become a new single organisation with a single Board, CEO and Executive Team. There are then options for how integrated the teams are beneath this within directorates.
The papers describe the case for change with a recommendation to the boards for a full merger.
A fully merged NCL and NWL ICB would be the largest in terms of population size in England – serving circa 4.5m people, living in 13 London Boroughs (eight from NWL and five from NCL).
The recommendation points out that being able to offer scale, as a merged organisation, would enable more resilience and cost-effectiveness, and also highlights the appeal of retaining and attracting staff, and having greater opportunities to collaborate with partners across the combined area.
The options were examined and evaluated by each ICB against key criteria to explore how each would enable their own organisations to continue to provide high quality and robust services. The recommendation to both Boards is for full merger.
Both meetings will be held in public on the 22 July for NCL ICB and the 23 July for NWL ICB.
Details of how to observe the meetings are here:
NCL – by emailing nclicb.meetingsquestions@nhs.net to register to attend, noting that questions to the Board need to be submitted by Monday 21 July.
NWL – details are available on this web page: Meetings calendar: NHS North West London ICS.