Health and wellbeing boards: Making them work

The findings of this project were published in April 2012.

• Health and wellbeing boards: System leaders or talking shops?

The project was rooted in work with two local authorities and their health partners, to facilitate the establishment of their local health and wellbeing boards. It involved:

• a literature search to establish current knowledge of health and wellbeing board implementation and an evaluation of similar initiatives to promote local joint working
• telephone interviews with health and wellbeing board leads in a sample of around 50 early implementer sites (drawn from a representative mixture of councils, regions and urban/rural)
• further interviews with main stakeholders in two early implementer sites – Surrey and Lambeth.

The findings from this work were published in April 2012

Health and wellbeing boards are an important feature of the NHS reforms and have emerged from the NHS listening exercise with strengthened powers.

This project had three main aims.

• To gain insight into how local authorities and their health partners are implementing health and wellbeing boards in the context of the government’s NHS reforms, its vision for adult social care and the localism bill.
• To capture the overall approach of a sample of English councils in establishing these new arrangements, supported by a more detailed examination of the experience of  two early implementer sites whom The King’s Fund has been assisting.
• To identify the lessons that could be applied to the roll-out of health and wellbeing boards elsewhere, the issues that local authorities and their health partners need to address in the next stage of their development and the implications for policy.

• Richard Humphries