In the midst of the unprecedented challenges facing the service, there's a growing emphasis on how continuous improvement might help, not just within individual organisations but across provider collaboratives given their critical role in realising the benefits of system working. To respond to this, we established the Provider collaboratives: Improving equitably programme. This initiative, launched in July 2023 in collaboration with the Q community and supported by the Health Foundation and NHS England, aims to bolster provider collaboratives in fostering shared improvement approaches with a strong equity focus right from the start.
We are pleased to now be launching the second phase. Over the next nine months, we will be working closely with five provider collaboratives, their senior leaders, and board members in a bespoke peer-learning and coaching programme.
It's early days, as revealed by our recent survey of senior leaders in provider collaboratives, with only 5% of respondents reporting substantial progress in embedding shared improvement approaches at the provider collaborative level, 17% said this is now underway, while 38% said they have only just started on this journey.
Responding to the needs expressed by senior leaders in provider collaboratives, particularly in addressing health inequalities, we have spent the past eight months facilitating learning and identifying actionable insights to create an enabling environment for sustainable, equity-focused improvement. This journey has included peer-learning webinars that share in-depth case studies of equitable improvement in practice and the development of a virtual knowledge hub, offering key board resources, event recordings and insights.
Our aim is to build on the learning so far in the first phase of the programme and delve deeper into understanding the prerequisites for equitable improvement in provider collaboratives, with a particular focus on the role of senior leadership.
Evidence shows us that senior leadership is a critical success factor in driving improvement, ensuring teams have the resources and capability they need, unblocking barriers, giving space to test and iterate, and role modelling the behaviours needed to build and foster a culture of equitable continuous improvement.
During the second phase, as each provider collaborative progresses on a strategic priority area, they will be involved in workshops, team coaching sessions, and active engagement with their stakeholders. We are pleased to announce the five participating provider collaboratives:
- Acute Hospitals Alliance (acute)
- Humber and North Yorkshire Collaboration of Acute Providers (acute)
- Joined Up Care Derbyshire (all in)
- Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (community)
- South Yorkshire Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism Provider Collaborative (mental health).
By the end of this programme, we anticipate that these collaboratives will have significantly advanced their shared improvement approaches, gained a deeper understanding of the board's role in enabling improvement at scale across organisations and strengthened their leadership capability.
Throughout the year, we will be synthesising insights with the cohort and disseminating these learnings across the provider sector through various channels such as events, blogs, and resources. We hope that the lessons and changes developed through this programme will be able to be taken up more widely across many more provider collaboratives.
To stay updated, please visit the programme page on our website. Should you have any queries about the programme or wish to share your improvement work with fellow members, please don't hesitate to reach out to a member of our team.
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