NHS-led Provider Collaboratives

This is a short film to share the story of the children and young people's provider collaborative in Surrey.

A provider collaborative is a partnership arrangement involving two organisations with a shared purpose.

Surrey Heartlands and Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust are working together to deliver the children and young people's provider collaborative. The partnership allows us to plan and develop specialist services to meet the needs of children and young people with complex mental health difficulties at a local level.

A provider collaborative is a partnership between different organisations in the same geographical area that come together to commission or purchase high-quality inpatient specialist mental health care. It's no surprise the pandemic has had a significant impact on the emotional health and well-being of children and families across Surrey and we have seen a significant increase in the requests for help and requests for support for children, it's the number of children with eating disorders, we've seen a significant increase number of children attending A&E, self-harming and in crisis and really complex mental health needs [Music]

We create a unique provider collaborative and the uniqueness comes from the fact that we are not in partnership with a neighbouring mental health trust we are in fact reporting to our ICS at Surrey Heartlands so we are, I think, one of the few provider collaboratives nationally that are working in this way.

So we work really closely with other provider collaboratives, particularly in the south-east however the exciting thing is that we are aiming to have our own Surrey tier 4 general adolescent unit by summer of 2023, it will change the dynamic for our provider collaborative because at the moment we don't have any tier four beds in Surrey, but also as we're continuing to grow and develop and working with other provider collaboratives and neighbouring boundaries there are other things that we can be learning from them so it's really about keeping those relationships going and building on that.

We're part of a group of providers we have access to health care as well as education and children's services so a real multi-disciplinary approach we help to unblock barriers in the system to discharge to accessing care ensuring the care is within the most local area to the young person in their family and I think as well when there are young people who with on our learning disability and autism program we make sure that the care they're being provided is really appropriate to them as well it's about relationship building ensuring that we've got really good healthy collaborative working relationships with our providers with our clinicians as well so very often the role is a gateway between all those services and it's about improving the quality of care ensuring that all the children young people and their families are accessing the highest standard of care.

[Music] We work really well really closely with the community providers so at Surrey and Borders we have Hope services in place which is a joint service that supports children with that are in distress or in severe mental health issues and we work really closely with the local authorities so um having a provider collaborative in Surrey means that we are already working in a really integrated way and this just means it's just the last piece of jigsaw really if you like for us in Surrey to be able to oversee the whole pathway for the child [Music]

I work in the child and adolescent eating disorders team in Surrey the community outpatient team and I assess and provide medical treatment for young people with eating disorders our team is very dedicated to keeping our patients at home and the provider collaborative has provided an opportunity to help reduce both the number of admissions and the duration of admission so we can keep young people at home for as long as possible and treat them at home for as long as possible we believe that young people get better at home with their families and you know with access to school and education rather than going to inpatient units where they're away from their families for months at a time and away from their friends in their schools [Music]

One of the issues that there's been with care in the past that hasn't been fully joined up between the different providers that provide care what his provider collaboratives will do is allow for all to be more joined up and for providers to collaborate more with each other kind of in the name and hopefully in terms of the real-life impact on young people that should mean that there is smooth pathways of care. It will allow communication between different providers to occur more efficiently and this will mean that you know you spend less time waiting between different referrals and different kinds of parts of care it will just really make things look a lot smoother and also it introduces my role which allows for more participation and co-production from young people and from their families

I think the future for the provider collaboratives is very important in terms of the fact that we are able to [Music] arrange all of the pathways for that child all of the decisions and all the local delegated authority remains in Surrey so we can make local decisions for local families for children across Surrey. [Music]