The national new care models programme was established to develop and test new ways of delivering care in line with the vision for health and care services set out in the Five year forward view.

As the programme comes to an end a new focus has been placed on the legacy and successful work of the vanguard sites to transform and integrate health and social care. Leaders are also looking at ways in which the vanguards can help inform the journey to accountable care.

A new focus has been placed on the legacy and successful work of the vanguard sites to transform and integrate health and social care.

To help share learning from the vanguards NHS Providers, NHS Confederation, NHS Clinical Commissioners and the Local Government Association have produced a series of briefing documents to highlight what some of the vanguards have been doing and share lessons that other organisations and partnerships can take from the vanguards’ experiences.

The three briefing documents explore:

• what the vanguards set out to achieve when it comes to supporting people and communities to stay well
• what the vanguards set out to achieve when it comes to involving and engaging staff in new care models
• what can be learned from the vanguards’ efforts to design, test and deliver a variety of scalable and replicable new care models.

Learning from the vanguards: supporting people and communities to stay well explores how the vanguards have sought to design health and care services around the needs of people who use them, focusing on the outcomes that matter to people and tailoring care to their needs and goals. It also explores how the vanguards have adopted community- and asset-based approaches to consider the broadest possible influencers on health and care.

Learning from the vanguards: staff at the heart of new care models looks at how the vanguards have broken down traditional organisational barriers across whole systems, how they have engaged staff in the programmes, communicated change and supported staff to work differently. The vanguards have demonstrated the positive impact that effective leadership and open, permissive cultures can have on motivating staff to lead and embrace change.   

Learning from the vanguards: spreading and scaling up change explores the ten key factors that the vanguards have identified are crucial to encourage the spread of initiatives. These include the importance of involving clinicians in change, building shared goals across systems, and creating the time, space and resources for large scale change. This briefing points to how the vanguards have benefitted from the co-ordinated support of the arm’s-length bodies and their permission to ‘fail fast and learn faster’. It also highlights how investing heavily in different ways of sharing learning, building networks and bringing people together, have been critical to the vanguards.  

This briefing series will be an important resource for others who are working with partners in their local areas to re-design care to deliver transformational and lasting change.

Looking to the future, sustainability and transformation partnerships (STPs), accountable care systems (ACS) and accountable care organisations (ACOs) will be key vehicles for scaling up and spreading the models.

This briefing series will be an important resource for others who are working with partners in their local areas to re-design care to deliver transformational and lasting change.

Read our briefing series ’Learning from the vanguards’ online.

The NHS Confederation, NHS Providers, NHS Clinical Commissioners and the Local Government Association are working together to help spread the learning from the vanguard programme more widely across the health and care sector - see the full series of resources which help explain the purpose and aims of the vanguard programme.