With the help of hundreds of local people, we’ve developed our vision and priorities for transforming health and care for people living in south east London. The priorities focus on helping people stay healthy and well, delivering more joined-up, convenient care, and better supporting people from marginalised communities.
Our mission is to help people in South East London to live the healthiest possible lives.
We will do this through helping people to stay healthy and well, providing effective treatment when people become ill, caring for people throughout their lives, taking targeted action to reduce health inequalities, and supporting resilient, happy communities as well as the workforce that serves them.
Health and wellbeing
We want to become a system that is excellent at protecting health and wellbeing as well as treating illness. At present, we have a set of
services focused more on treating people when they become sick rather than supporting them to stay healthy.
We will invest in more joined-up and effective preventative health services that go out to find people who need help and intervene earlier to avoid serious illness.
We will work in partnership to create healthier environments and use the power of our voluntary sector and communities to support healthier living and happier lives.
Convenient and responsive care
We want to make it as easy as possible for people to interact with our services, tackle long waiting times and offer more convenient and responsive care. Local people continue to tell us how difficult it is to communicate with us, access care and
navigate our health and care system.
We will develop high-quality online consultations for people who want them, without excluding people who want face-to-face care. We will deliver more care in or close to people’s homes. We will dismantle models of care that take up people’s time and lead to travel or other costs that could be avoided. We will use the power of technology and simplify our services to make them easier for people to understand and use.
Whole-person care
We will bring together professions and services to deliver joined-up, team-based care. In our system, people rely on separate, disconnected teams for support with different physical health, mental health and social needs, rather than joined-up, responsive services that can help with all the issues that matter to them at the right time.
Local people should be able to rely on a single small team who they know and trust to provide most of their care. Wherever possible, those teams should draw on specialist expertise from across our system, including the voluntary and community sector when needed, rather than automatically asking people to go elsewhere for parts of their care.
We will lay the foundation for stronger relationships between local people and their caregivers, with more compassionate, trusting and person-centred care. We want to make sure that core teams of staff make shared decisions with people and their carers and deal with the issues that matter most to them.
Reducing health inequalities
We know that people from marginalised, disadvantaged or deprived communities are less likely to be registered with a GP practice, find it harder to access services, suffer poorer overall health and have worse outcomes from care. We will target resources at those most in need to tackle gaps in access, quality of care and health outcomes for different social groups.
We will work with local people to develop more tailored and culturally appropriate services to better meet the needs of women, marginalised and disadvantaged communities in our society, for example finding new ways to connect with people, adapting our existing services and developing different types of services where needed to deliver convenient and effective care.
Partnership with our staff and communities
We rely on the creativity and commitment of our brilliant, diverse staff. We will support staff in our system to improve services and join up care. We will work in close partnership with local people, patients and service users as we design and deliver care, so we focus on the issues that really matter to them, making full use of the strengths of our communities to improve health and wellbeing.
We will use our economic power as an employer, a buyer of goods and services and an investor to make South East London an even better place to live and work.
Securing our sustainability
We need to deliver effective support for the health and wellbeing of the residents of South East London while staying within our financial means and reducing our environmental impact. We need to deliver more efficient care, work together to avoid duplication, and rapidly reduce our carbon emissions in our work to become ‘net zero’ by 2045.
Net zero means achieving a balance between the amount of greenhouse gas produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere.
Our priorities:
Prevention and wellbeing
Become better at preventing ill health and helping people in south east London to live healthier lives.
Ensuring a good start in life
Ensuring parents, children and families receive the most effective support before and during childbirth and in early years
Children and young people’s mental health
Ensuring that children and young people receive early and effective support for common mental health challenges.
Adults’ mental health
Ensuring that adults in south east London receive early and effective support for common mental health challenges.
Primary care and people with long term conditions
Ensuring that people, including those with continuing health needs, can conveniently access high quality primary care services.
Read our strategic priorities to see how we are going to enable change
Download the strategic priorities
Download appendices
Read insight from people and communities
Read our 2023/24 medium term objectives and plans
