Integrated care

Now the Health and Care Act has been passed, Richard Murray reflects on the negotiations that went down to the wire, what didn’t make it and what’s needed to ensure the reforms are successful.

Social prescribing link workers are on the front line of the fight for population health. They know it, but need more support to deliver on the promise of their roles, as Laura Lamming explores.

In a recent roundtable, local health leaders identified five relationships that need to be strengthened to successfully manage elective backlogs.

Integrated care systems are intended to be part of a new way of working in health and care based on principles of partnership and collective responsibility. Chris Naylor asks whether this original vision is already at risk and what making a reality of it would involve.

The Healthy communities together programme was set up by The King's Fund and The National Lottery Community Fund in 2019 and supports local partnership working to improve the health and wellbeing of local communities. Helen Gilburt and the Healthy communities together team reflect on the learning from the programme so far.

The Covid-19 vaccination programme was one of the few largely unqualified successes of the pandemic response. Nicholas Timmins summarises the findings of a new report on what made the roll-out work, and what can be learnt for the future.

Johnson Neo reflects on the role that clinicians can play in improving population health and considers how applying a framework can help make sense of the factors that can impact on their patients’ health.

David Buck and Toby Lewis consider the opportunities of NHS England’s new ‘Core20plus5’ approach to tackling health inequalities, and reflect on how the NHS begins to adapt its role and work more strongly with others to tackle the root causes as well as symptoms.