Health and wellbeing boards: making them work
Our work
Health and wellbeing boards are an important feature of the NHS reforms and are key to promoting greater integration of health and local government services. See our most recent analysis and sign up to our free monthly bulletin below.
Health and wellbeing boards: System leaders or talking shops?
Faced with complex organisational change, unprecedented financial pressures and rising demand for services, will health and wellbeing boards be able to achieve greater success than previous bodies?
Read the report: Health and wellbeing boards: System leaders or talking shops
Search our health and wellbeing boards directory
Our directory shows details and contact information for health and wellbeing boards and clinical commissioning groups in England.
Search the health and wellbeing board directory
Sign up to our free health and wellbeing boards bulletin
We've launched a free monthly bulletin containing the latest news, policy developments and guidance around health and wellbeing boards.
If you would like to receive the bulletin next month, sign up to our alert service.
See previous health and wellbeing board bulletins:
About this project
What did we do as part of this piece of work?
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.
Why did we do work in this area?
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.
Download the final paper
The findings of this project were published in April 2012.
Health and wellbeing boards: System leaders or talking shops?
