The challenge
In 2021, an opportunity arose for Humber and North Yorkshire Health and Care Integrated Care System (HNY HCP ICS) to bid for funding from NHS England’s national health and justice team alongside their partners, including the health, local authority and voluntary and community sectors.
They aspired to develop a collaborative approach to enhancing support for vulnerable children and young people who have or may have experienced trauma or adversity and those at risk of encountering the Youth Justice System, also known as the Vanguard for the Framework for Integrated Care (Community).
The Framework for Integrated Care (Community) was developed by NHS England to invest in additional support and care for vulnerable children and young people with complex needs in the community. HNY HCP ICS was delighted to learn that they were to become one of 12 selected ‘vanguards’ to deliver this work over a 10-year period across Integrated Care Systems (ICS) / Provider Collaborative (PC) footprints.
Due to workforce and time constraints across the multi-agency system and the fact that the work needed to be started with immediate effect, the NECS health and justice team was engaged to support the mobilisation of this work.
Our response
We undertook a detailed scoping exercise, engaging with stakeholders from a wide range of place-based statutory and non-statutory organisations to:
- Understand existing current trauma-informed initiatives.
- Understand current service provision and needs analysis of the target complex needs cohort.
- Review local data and information to support understanding of the ICS’s challenges and needs, and to build an understanding and direction in relation to planning and rolling out the Vanguard over the period described above.
Our activity included:
- Detailed service mapping including speech and language, sensory integration and neuro-diversity pathways, and the potential to work with lead providers to enhance these pathways and identify gaps in provision.
- Understanding the strategies / pathways for identifying and effectively engaging with CYP.
- Mapping key challenges for place based statutory organisations.
- Mapping how effectively the multi-agency partnerships in each place were working and the impact on children and young people’s outcomes.
- Mapping workforce training needs in relation to trauma informed care, multi-agency working and integrated care, including a training audit.
- Exploring opportunities to work at scale for highly specialised needs.
The first phase of this work was so successful that the work was extended into a second phase of scoping where additional deliverables included:
- Developing and expanding the scoping and baseline exercise to include additional stakeholder consultation to achieve wider geographical representation.
- To research and develop a trauma-informed self and peer evaluation toolkit to be rolled out across the Vanguard, with the potential to upscale its use across a wider geographical footprint, potentially leading to a national toolkit that could be used across all Vanguards.
Outcomes
The products delivered under this project included:
- HYJIP Framework for Integrated Care Community (FfICC) strategic vision document.
- Trauma-informed community implementation strategy.
- FfICC 10-year implementation plan and delivery tool.
- Update report template for FfICC implementation plan management.
- Data protection impact assessment – a process to help identify and minimise the data protection risks that could hinder a project.
- Equalities impact assessment – a process that ensures a project does not unlawfully discriminate against any of the nine protected characteristics as identified in the Equalities Act 2010.
- Scoping report and trauma-informed self and peer evaluation toolkit.
- Scoping exercise data insights toolkit.
- Trauma-informed training audit.
“I have found all members of your team to be a real asset to the development of the programme. They have worked hard and really helped to progress the development of the CYP health and justice programme. I felt that they were not just people brought in on a temporary contract but that they have worked with me, so we felt like they were part of my team and it was a team effort which has been great.
I have found them to be very diligent and hard working as well as flexible and solution focused and thorough in their work. Communication has been excellent which has meant that I have been able to be kept up to speed with what they were doing and ensure it was what was needed for the programme, and also felt confident that they could work autonomously without the need for significant oversight.
The work produced has been of a high standard and they have worked well with partners to ensure the strategies, plans and other work produced have been owned by the partnership, not just NECS. It’s been a pleasure working with them.”