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North East London (NEL) Collaboratives

North East London (NEL) Collaboratives

The NHS faces significant challenges including rising demand for services, workforce and funding challenges. 

Rather than work as a single organisation, trying to solve some of these problems, it makes more sense to work in partnership to try to address these issues together. 

Our challenges are not unique to us and are consistent across the geographies we work in and the providers we work with. 

NEL Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism

The aim of the collaborative is to work together to improve outcomes, quality, value and equity for people with, or at risk of, mental health problems and/or learning disability and autism in north east London.

NEL Community Services Collaborative

The Collaborative will improve access, waiting times and outcomes, through co-production and pathway redesign with users and carers.

NCEL Child and Adolescent Mental Health Tier 4 Service Collaborative

The aim of this specialist services collaborative is to improve patient and carer experience of inpatient services whilst delivering seamless pathways young people and families accessing our services.

NCEL Perinatal Collaborative

This is a new collaborative in North Central and East London with the primary focus on mother and baby perinatal beds across the systems.

North London Forensic Consortium

This is a specialist services collaborative across three Integrated Care Systems in North London.

Glossary

Understand what we mean by terms such as 'intergrated care board', 'provider collaboratives' and 'improvement networks'.

By working collaboratively with NHS, local authorities and other partners across the systems and places we deliver services, we stand a better chance of improving the quality of care we provide, making it more sustainable and better value for money. NHS England has argued that the challenges facing providers after the Covid-19 pandemic are too much for a single organisation to tackle. Formalising provider collaboratives is a culmination of a national policy focus on addressing these challenges through system working and exploring the potential of working at scale.

The scale of challenge in the NHS is so big at the moment, it is easy to lose sight of what we’re trying to do. We all want to improve population health outcomes and tackle inequity for our patients through the standardisation of clinical care. All of these things are hard to achieve. Some will be easier to address at scale as a system, through formal collaboratives, while other improvements might be made on a smaller scale through improvement networks or service innovation and integration.

  • The aim of working in collaboration with our partners are to deliver better access and outcomes for our patients and wider communities. 
  • By working together across places and systems, we can look at how we can best spend the funding available for health to ensure more equitable access to services across our communities. 
  • We can provide more care closer to home, or in a setting best suited to recovery, improving outcomes for our patients. 

 

  • We can have a greater impact in reducing inequalities for different groups of people in our communities by focusing on population health outcomes. 
  • We can make services easier for patients to use and navigate, ensuring they don’t have to spend time repeating their stories and having to go through their information numerous times.
  • Through working more collaboratively we can look to create opportunities for our workforce too. Partnership working helps us to think differently about the way we provide services and encourages innovation. This means there are more chances to develop new and innovative roles for colleagues to support growth and development. 
  • Collaboration also allows us to pool our resources and get better value for money in areas such as training and development, again opening more options for staff to think about their career paths and learning. 
  • Working closely with colleagues from other areas can also help us to think differently about the best way to deliver services, bringing new ideas and creating the chance to reshape how we do things to better meet the needs of our patients and their loved ones. 
  • In smaller services, or those under lots of pressure, closer working arrangements enable mutual aid and support to happen quickly and ensure that patient safety and high-quality care can be prioritised.

Contact us

To learn more about the NEL collaborative please send your query via email to elft.communication@nhs.net.