Introduction

 

The new care models programme is a large-scale experiment by the NHS’s national bodies to develop ‘major new care models’ that can be replicated across England. Introduced by the NHS’s Five year forward view in 2014 and launched in 2015, it aims to break down the traditional barriers between health and care organisations to establish more personalised and coordinated health services for patients.

The programme aims to reconcile ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to change management. To do this, 50 local vanguard sites were selected to develop new care models, supported by a national programme led by NHS England over 3 years.

‘[The NHS needed] to overcome the artificial dichotomy between change being led centrally or locally… This is not one size fits all, not 1,000 flowers blooming; it’s horses for courses.’

Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of NHS England

The national programme is due to end in March 2018. Responsibility for establishing new care models across the country is already shifting to sustainability and transformation partnerships (STPs) and accountable care systems (ACSs), which operate across larger geographies than the vanguards. The plan is that STPs and ACSs will continue to grow existing new care models and encourage the creation of new ones. NHS England is aiming for half of England to be covered by new care models by 2020/21.

Sharing learning from the new care models

As the focus moves to much larger place-based systems and expansion and coverage of the models, for some, it would seem that new models are already at risk of becoming old news. As focus shifts towards STPs and ACSs, valuable learning from the experience of those working within the vanguard sites may be lost.

In this report the Health Foundation has captured and shared some of this experience by focusing on how the sites made change happen in complex environments and between a diverse range of stakeholders.

By exploring what the leaders within vanguard sites thought, felt and did, and drawing on the literature of cross-organisational change, this report sets out 10 lessons that may help providers and commissioners to develop new models of care locally. It does not attempt to quantify how quickly or how much the new models changed outcomes – evaluations of the models are currently ongoing.

How was the learning captured?

This report gathers learning from the first 2 years of work across three of the five types of new care models – enhanced health in care homes (EHCHs), multispecialty community providers (MCPs) and primary and acute care systems (PACSs).,, Of the 50 vanguard sites, 29 were selected as one of these types of new care model in March 2015. It was too early in the development of the other two types of new care model – urgent and emergency care systems and acute care collaborations – to include them in the research, as they were selected in August and September 2015 respectively.

To inform this report, a scoping exercise was undertaken. This involved attending local and national new care model events, as well as analysing the documents produced by all 29 of the relevant vanguard sites.

Eight vanguards were then identified as case studies for this report, to provide a representative spread of the new care model types and geographies. 45 local, middle to senior clinical and non-clinical leaders and evaluators were interviewed across the eight sites.

To aid the analysis, key national policy documents from the last 10 years were reviewed, as was academic literature about cross-organisational change and improvement.

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