Issue - meetings

Following the presentation given at the previous Health and Wellbeing Board (HWB) meeting the Director had prepared a report which outlined a proposal for the joint use of the Better Care Fund (BCF), previously referred to by the Department of Health as the Integration Transformation Fund (ITF).  The intention of the fund was to support an increase in the scale and pace of integration between health and social care and provide a mechanism for promoting joint planning for the sustainability of local health and care economies against a background of significant savings targets right across the system. 

In addition to the overarching integration agenda a number of national conditions and measures are attached to the fund designed to move resources across the system towards prevention and short term care interventions and away from high cost care packages in residential or acute settings.

Locally the Chairman of the Board and Directors from both the Local Authority and Bromley’s Clinical Commissioning Group were proposing to use the Fund to:

• Fund services that came under the banner of ‘short term interventions and preventative services’ in the community in order to mitigate the pressures on long term care packages and admissions into secondary care that were putting considerable financial strain on the Health and Care system as a whole;
• Include services that helped both Health and Care deliver against some of their respective legislative duties as set out in the Health and Care Act 2012 and the Care Bill (currently going through parliament and likely to become an Act in 2014);
• ‘Clean up’ historical joint funding arrangements moving existing joint funded community services into a pooled budget of which the BCF would make up a core component.

Access to the BCF was dependent on agreement of a local 2-year plan for 2014/15 (the planning year) and 2015/16 (first full year).  The plans had been first agreed jointly by the Local Authority and Bromley’s Clinical Commissioning Group and authorised by their respective Executives.

A template has been produced nationally for local areas to complete their submissions to NHS England. This template had been completed locally and attached to the report for the Board’s consideration.

The final sign off required before the Local Plan could be submitted to NHS England needed to be provided by the Board. One of the critical responsibilities for HWBs, as set out in the Health and Care Act 2012, was to encourage joint working and integration in their locality wherever there were clear benefits to the local population. The BCF provided a vehicle that could be used to sustain and accelerate this agenda as well as support the creation of a pooled budget.

The timetable for submission was very tight and Bromley’s submission had to be with NHS England by 14^th February. The final deadline was 4^th April 2014 which gave officers time to finalise the indicative budgets.

The Board requested an outline setting out how the funding could be used.  One of the areas of change would be  ...  view the full minutes text for item 49