Mid and South Essex Community Services

Community services in Mid and South Essex are delivered by three organisations – EPUT NELFT and Provide CIC. The three sovereign organisations have been working as a provider collaborative for 3 years under a contractual joint venture. The provider collaborative is known as the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (MSECC).

All three community contracts are coterminous and expire at the end of March 2024

Community health services are complex and as a result of legacy commissioning arrangements there are substantial variation in the way services are commissioned and delivered across MSE. This disparity is closely related to historic CCG funding variance.

Moving to a hosted single contract for community services across the ICS is in line with National Strategies of the NHS Long Term Plan and the Health Care Act (2022), which place a strong emphasis on the integration of Health and Care services and the expansion of community services, with more services delivered at home.

It is expected that a single solution across the ICS footprint will deliver more effective care focused at place, mitigating inequalities and providing consistent care across the whole of the ICB. The community services will align to the four key aims established for MSEICS:

1. Improve outcomes in populations health and healthcare
2. Tackle inequalities in outcomes, experience and access
3. Enhance productivity and value for money
4. Support broader social and economic development

Locking MSECC into the system architecture provides the opportunity to create the stability needed to both deliver the immediate system priorities as well as support a strategic review of community services’ future needs, with the view to create a core offer of community health care for people in mid and south Essex that safeguards an effective and sustainable health and care system.

The three providers are the only technically capable of delivering the services based on the factors above and the significant time all organisations and the ICB have spent developing this integrated model. The contract will be awarded to Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) with North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT) and Provide Community Interest Company (CIC) as significant sub-contract partners.