David Behan, Director General for Social Care, Local Government and Care Partnerships, talks about the work to support the new strategic leadership role for local councils as they establish new health and wellbeing boards.
Leadership from local councils is at the heart of the Government’s ambition for the future of health and care.
In future, councils will take on the major responsibility of improving the health and life-chances of the local populations they serve, and will lead others to work together to improve health and wellbeing.
We will introduce real, local democratic accountability to health care for the first time in almost 40 years by giving councils the power to agree local strategies to bring the NHS, public health and social care together. This will give an unprecedented opportunity to integrate health, social care and other services for people and to support them to stay well
Local authorities will have a lead role in integrating the commissioning of health, social care and public health services to better meet the needs of individuals and families using the services.
Health and wellbeing boards are due to be established in every upper tier authority from 2013 and our ambition is that they will run in shadow form from 2012.
The Government’s vision is for health and wellbeing boards to drive a genuinely collaborative approach to commissioning. GP consortia and councils’ commissioning plans will be firmly underpinned by a shared understanding of the needs of the community, through joint strategic needs assessments, and by the shared strategy that will best address those needs within the collective resources available through the health and wellbeing strategies.
These changes are not about mechanistically setting up board meetings – they are about changing the culture and behaviours within the system, building capacity and capability to respond to current and future challenges.
I know this agenda cannot be delivered from Whitehall – its success will depend on leadership in every local area. To support councils and their partners, we have been working with a group of 25 local areas, as well as the strategic health authorities and Local Government Group to begin setting up a network of early implementers of health and wellbeing boards, which I will invite all local authorities to engage in.
This network will give local areas the opportunity to work together to consider some of the major challenges during the transition period, such as how to build relationships between local government and GP consortia.
We’ve also set up a senior group of local government, Department of Health and NHS colleagues to have an oversight of how the whole transition is being managed at the interface between the NHS and local government, and to ensure the approach being taken nationally, regionally and locally is genuinely co-produced.
This is an exciting time for local government. I believe that with the leadership of local government, local communities will see real benefits in health and wellbeing.