Neighbourhood based care board update – November 2025
The South East London Neighbourhood Based Care Board (NBCB)meets every month to oversee and guide progress towards a neighbourhood-based model of care. As outlined in the government’s 10 Year Health Plan, the aim is to make health and care services more proactive, more joined-up, and more responsive to the needs of local people and communities.
This month’s update will focus on two key topics that were discussed at this month’s meeting: clinical governance and risk, and how we measure the benefits of neighbourhood working.
Clinical governance and risk – a crucial area of work
All southeast London boroughs are working through their models for Neighbourhood working. Alongside this, a workforce plan has been developed and agreed that is designed to support this work.
Since the approval of this workforce plan, many conversations have highlighted clinical governance and risk as key challenges to integrated working and the implementation of neighbourhood models.
In order to address this, the SEL People Programme team hosted two workshops with interested stakeholders. The aim of the workshop was to identify and discuss the challenges and solutions associated with this new way of working.
Over 70 people attended, and identified challenges in five key areas:
- Ambiguity in accountability and governance structures
- Digital, data sharing and information governance
- Workforce complexity and staff movement
- Culture change and communications
- Standards, regulation and risk
Workshop attendees then formed a working group to focus on taking action and finding solutions – which could be within the working group itself, at SEL level, or at regional and even national level.
This work is very important.
Moving to neighbourhood is complex and requires a lot of change, and quickly. There are plenty of potential barriers and pitfalls. However, as this workshop and working group demonstrate, there is also energy and determination to overcome problems and make progress.
The working group will meet monthly and report progress to the Board.
Measuring the benefits of neighbourhood working
We need to develop a shared, robust understanding of the impact the shift to neighbourhood working will have on our care system. This is critical to making strategic decisions about future investment as a system, shifting activity from hospital to community settings, and ensuring our model of care is sustainable and effective.
To support this, SEL ICS have partnered with PPL to develop an approach to modelling the benefits of Integrated Neighbourhood Teams (INTs).
The team are focusing on measuring the impact of INTs on demand for health and care services; both as a measure of impact, and of implications for system resources.
As with the questions around governance and risk, a large part of the challenge here is in working across the care system, where there is a variety of approaches and processes.
The team’s work to date has, therefore, involved engaging across the system to gather a wide range of available data, and to understand how to analyse that data in a consistent way.
The next stages of work will build on the modelling approach, particularly by engaging with provider finance teams to turn the model’s ‘theoretical’ financial outputs into an analysis that accounts for the on-the-ground reality of costs faced by providers over the short, medium, and long run.
The team also plans to turn the analysis developed in this phase of work into an interactive tool which can be used by colleagues across SEL for planning and analysis purposes.
You can find more details on all of the above, and progress reports from boroughs, in the board papers, which are here.
Other agenda items
Also on this month’s agenda were:
- An update on work on use of NHS 111 in south east London; how we provide, and guide members of the public to, the most appropriate service.
- Progress reports from Lewisham, and Lambeth and Southwark.