Letter to the chief executives of built-in care boards from well being ministers, the Ladies’s Well being Ambassador and the Chief Nursing Officer

Ladies’s Well being Technique for England and girls’s well being hubs

Pricey chief executives of built-in care boards ( ICBs )

The Ladies’s Well being Technique for England units out our 10-year ambitions for reinforcing the well being and wellbeing of ladies and ladies and bettering how the well being and care system listens to girls.

One in all our prime priorities is the growth of ladies’s well being hubs (‘hubs’). Hubs convey collectively healthcare professionals and present providers to supply built-in girls’s well being providers locally, specializing in bettering entry to care and lowering well being inequalities. We’re working throughout the Division of Well being and Social Care ( DHSC ), NHS England ( NHSE ), built-in care programs ( ICSs ) and different girls’s well being stakeholders to develop sources to assist encourage their growth.

£25 million funding in girls’s well being hubs

The £25 million funding introduced in March can be distributed equally to ICBs , with £595,000 in whole for every ICB . This can be transferred over the present and subsequent monetary 12 months (that’s, 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025), with 75% obtainable in 2023 to 2024 for speedy use.

That is to allow the institution of at the least one girls’s well being hub in each ICS , protecting actions reminiscent of venture administration and workforce growth, together with workers coaching and backfill. We encourage you to make full use of your funding allocation to speed up progress, noting that ICBs is not going to be anticipated to incur prices implementing a mannequin that isn’t recurrently inexpensive.

Methods can use the funding to determine a brand new hub or develop an present hub – both geographically or by way of providers provided. A hub inside every ICS can act as a proof of idea to help wider growth.

There isn’t a ‘one dimension matches all’ method to girls’s well being hubs. It’s important that providers are offered in a manner that greatest meets inhabitants wants and reduces well being inequalities. Equally, we have to make sure that hubs assist to ship the ambitions within the Ladies’s Well being Technique. To attain this, we’ve developed a package deal of sources to help hub implementation, together with:

a core specification for hubs, together with a well being hubs supply mannequin

a value profit evaluation, which outlines the anticipated set-up prices this funding could possibly be utilised on and the potential web social and monetary worth of hubs. The central situation (based mostly on proof from present hubs) estimates there can be £5 of advantages for each £1 spent on a main care network-sized hub

DHSC has developed a reporting template which ought to be accomplished and returned to NHSE by 30 September 2023. These returns will inform the method to evaluating the implementation and advantages of ladies’s well being hubs nationally, and additional native information could also be requested sooner or later. Additional abstract narrative updates can be requested by way of the 2024 to 2025 NHS operational planning system submissions

It’s anticipated that the hubs can be established by way of collaborative working throughout built-in care partnerships ( ICPs ), together with the NHS, public well being and the voluntary and neighborhood sector, and thru collaborative commissioning of contraception with native authorities. This funding is being transferred to ICBs to minimise administrative limitations, however our expectation is that it’s used collaboratively to greatest meet inhabitants wants and should not be restricted by commissioning boundaries.

Engagement and additional sources to help implementation

DHSC and NHSE will work collectively to develop additional sources to help the broader growth of hubs. Within the autumn, we’ll publish a commissioning specification for hubs and a toolkit for digital group consultations and digital engagement occasions in hubs. Moreover, Dame Lesley is internet hosting a sequence of webinars with present hubs and different specialists to help you as you develop plans in your system.

A community of ladies’s well being champions

Thanks all for nominating people out of your system to hitch our new nationwide community of ladies’s well being champions, co-chaired by Dame Lesley and Charlotte McArdle, Deputy Chief Nursing Officer, NHSE . This community brings collectively leaders in girls’s well being to help collaboration throughout system companions to enhance provision for ladies’s well being throughout the life course and scale back well being inequalities. Some programs might wish to have multiple champion, for instance, an govt degree ICB or ICP champion, and a place-based champion or scientific lead. The primary assembly of the community was held in the present day.

If you need to share another work you’re doing in girls’s well being, be concerned in creating sources, or have any questions, electronic mail sherree.fagge@nhs.uk

We’re copying this letter to the chairs of ICBs , the chairs of ICPs , native authority chief executives, NHSE regional administrators, and regional administrators from the Workplace for Well being Enchancment and Disparities.

Yours sincerely

Maria Caulfield, MP

Parliamentary Beneath Secretary of State (Minister for Psychological Well being and Ladies’s Well being Technique)

The Rt Hon Steve Barclay, MP

Secretary of State for Well being and Social Care

Professor Dame Lesley Regan

Ladies’s Well being Ambassador for England

Dame Ruth Might

Chief Nursing Officer, England