- North London Forensic Collaborative (NLFC) is the largest specialist mental health collaborative in England covering a population of six million people across 19 local authorities.
- The aim of the collaborative is to ensure that people who access services experience high quality care, as close to home as possible, which is connected to their local community.
- Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust is the collaborative’s lead provider, with delegated responsibility from NHS England to lead on the strategy, finance, quality assurance and improvement of forensic mental health services for people who originate from North London. This is delivered through a commissioning hub team which facilitates the collaborative governance structure.
- The collaborative has staff professional and pathway groups with representation from each provider trust. A central element of their role is to problem solve as a system, by sharing best practice and learning.
- Patient involvement is central to how NLFC delivers its commissioning responsibilities. They have a patient council which represents the voices of inpatients and plays a leading role in the co-design of quality improvements and new service developments.
- The NLFC lived experience model is aimed at developing experts by experience in the community, representing the voices of the people who use community services, across the three specialist community forensic services.
- NLFC has a peer engagement worker team which includes five paid staff who have lived experience of forensic or inpatient mental health services, recruited to work alongside case managers in a quality assurance role.
- Since its inception in 2020, NLFC has delivered a programme of work aimed at achieving the national targets set out in the NHS Long Term Plan, with a specific focus on reducing the number of inpatient beds and creating specialist community services.
- This has resulted in a 60% reduction in the number of adult secure placements outside of London, and a 63% reduction in out of London placements for patients with a learning disability and autism).
- NLFC believes they have had the greatest impact in their community transformation work which has significantly reduced their reliance on inpatient beds, with a 12% reduction over the past three years. This has released funding which they have been able to reinvest into community services every year.
- NLFC has specialist forensic community teams across each integrated care system (ICS) for both adult secure patients and individuals with a learning disability or autism.
- By working from the ground up and staying true to their values and objectives, NLFC has engendered a culture of support and continuous improvement.
- Co-design and involvement of service users through the patient council and the peer engagement workers has helped ensure they are getting valuable feedback and getting things right.