Northamptonshire Mental Health Learning Disability Autism Collaborative (NMHLDAC) programme is a partnership between Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Mental Health Northants Collaboration and Integrated Care Northamptonshire Integrated Care System (ICS).
System partners in Northamptonshire recognised that to tackle the stark inequalities that those with mental health issues, learning disabilities and/or autism face, they would need to plan, organise, invest and work together differently.
Action taken
The (then) clinical commissioning group, Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, together with wider stakeholders, built on their existing trusted relationships to take a new collective approach.
Through a process of coproduction, they learned what mattered most to service users and shifted their focus to person-centred care and success measures decided by patients themselves. They also began to pilot new integrated models of care.
A key enabler to this was an innovative move by the VCSE sector, in which seven local mental health charities came together under a formal framework, which had the significant benefit of allowing local commissioners to fund system-wide VCSE support under a single contract.
From 2021, NMHLDAC programme's vision was to bring strategic planning partners, operational leads, clinical experts, and people with lived experience together as equal partners.
Outcomes and impact
The programme and its outcome-based collaborative contract has been approved for continuation and expansion. It has also expanded VCSE integration into its new place-based community mental health teams, acute hospital teams, and suicide prevention/ bereavement pathways, and is now working with social care to align triumvirate mental health and care teams around neighbourhoods.
The NMHLDAC has given Northamptonshire's VCSE sector an equal voice in the strategic planning of pathways, and deployment of financial resource. In return, the VCSE sector collaborative has provided Northamptonshire service users with greater choice, control, and opportunity to receive health and care services on their own terms.
Read more about the work of Northamptonshire Mental Health Learning Disability Autism Collaborative which is a partnership between Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Mental Health Northants Collaboration and Integrated Care Northamptonshire ICS.