South East London Integrated Care System has shared five priorities for the ICS to focus on in the next five years, developed after an engagement exercise in the summer with local people, staff and partners.
The ICS is now asking the public to review each priority with questions asking them what they need, there they would go for help, and what good care would look like to them, in relation to each of the priorities.
The first priority is “ensuring that everyone in South East London receives convenient and effective care to prevent disease and for early detection of illness.”
The ICS highlights how there are differences in health between groups of residents in south east London, particularly in areas such as heart disease, cancer and mental health. By focusing on early intervention and prevention the hope is to stop people getting sick or worsening of conditions.
The second priority is “ensuring that mothers, children and families receive effective pre-natal, postnatal and early years support”.
Here, the ICS say: “We know there is a lot we can do to target and improve care. For example, a significant number of babies are born below a healthy weight, a significant number of children are not well prepared for school, and the maternal mortality rate for Black and Asian mothers is much higher than for the population as a whole.”
The third priority is “ensuring children and young people can access effective early intervention services for mental health challenges.”
“We have heard that young people do not always feel safe on the streets, that what happens at school such as bullying or exam pressure can impact their wellbeing, that young LGBTQ+ people have experience of hate crime and may not see the world as a friendly or safe place,” the ICS acknowledges.
“Ensuring that adults have rapid access to a broad range of effective early intervention services for mental health challenges,” is the fourth priority.
The ICS notes that four of the six boroughs in south east London have a rate of common mental health issues higher than the London average. They add that feedback highlighted that people who have experienced trauma need better access to responsive services and that the ICS needs to develop a trauma, gender and cultural approach to mental health services, along with more support for carers.
The fifth priority is “ensuring that people can access high quality primary care and people with long term conditions receive high quality, joined up and convenient care.”
Here, the ICS states that a lot of local residents are living with more than one long-term health condition; that many conditions are undiagnosed; and that people feel that they are often seen a collection of conditions and not treated holistically, with a more coordinated way of working required. In addition, feedback shows that some sections of the community such as refugees, asylum seekers and homeless people can find it hard to register with GP surgeries.
People can add their ideas to the ICS’s priority page to provide feedback on the priorities; find out more here.
