Contract signing begins new era for mental health services in Northamptonshire
Contracts have been signed to officially confirm ‘collaborative’ status for Integrated Care Northamptonshire’s Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism (MHLDA) programme.
This momentous occasion – which cements the next phase of work to deliver better outcomes for our county’s population – was marked with a special signing session at Berrywood Hospital in Northampton. 
In attendance to complete the signing of the contracts were Toby Sanders, Chief Executive of NHS Northamptonshire Integrated Care Board (NICB), and Angela Hillery, Chief Executive of Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (NHFT).
They were joined by MHLDA programme leads Anne Rackham and Morgan Price, Andy Willis - a former service user who is now an MHLDA lived experience lead - and David Williams, Director of Strategy and Partnerships for NHFT.
Collaboratives provide a legal framework for organisations to work together in partnership to design and improve services to meet the needs of communities as part of an integrated care system.
The formalisation of the MHLDA programme’s collaborative status means an outcomes-based contract is now in place for service providers in Northamptonshire to work jointly towards shared ambitions, with the priorities of service users and their families at the heart of strategic planning.
Reflecting on the signing of the contracts, Toby Sanders said: “This is a key milestone today. We’re putting contractually into a framework the huge amount of work and effort that’s gone in over several years across a whole range of different partners that really frames what we are trying to do around our integrated care system working.
“It’s about how our statutory NHS organisations are working with the voluntary sector, with communities, with patients from a co-design perspective. This new framework will enable that good work to carry on – to continue to accelerate over the next few years.”
Angela Hillery added: “This is a real opportunity to improve outcomes for our people who have mental health needs. They have been involved all the way through, which is why I’m very confident it will reach them and it will make a difference to them.
“Of course, the partnership working is fundamental because without partnership working we can’t achieve it. Nobody can achieve it on their own. This represents a real platform to make that difference. We’ve got a mandate to act – we really have it, we want to do it and we will make a difference for everyone.”
Northamptonshire’s MHLDA collaborative has agreed the following five shared ambitions:
- Improve outcomes
- Make the best use of available resources
- Focus on longer-term transformation
- Collaboration, not competition
- Give a strategic voice to service users
Anne Rackham, Senior Responsible Officer for the MHLDA Collaborative, said: “Since 2016 we have had a well-defined set of shared challenges and developed a new approach to working collaboratively across whole pathways and populations – but the previous contractual framework meant there were limits to the transformation that we could deliver.
“As a formal collaborative, we can do much more to achieve our shared ambitions, with clinical leadership, equality among system partners, and the voice of the service user at the centre of our work.”
Watch: go behind the scenes of the MHLDA contract signing in this video.