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What is an ICS?

What is an Integrated Care System and what does it mean for you?

From the Catford Cat, to the Brixton Windmill and Chislehurst Caves, south east London is a vibrant, fun, unique and richly diverse place to live, grow, learn and work.

There are more than 1.9 million people living across our six boroughs – Bexley, Bromley, Greenwich, Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark.

Watch our video to learn more about the South East London Integrated Care System, and what it means for you.

Local family and a young son with inhaler

Looking at the challenges and needs of our communities

If you are parents with a young family, you might need help ensuring your children have the healthiest possible start in life. If you are middle-aged, and have started to suffer from asthma or heart disease, you might need help to stay fit and healthy. If you are a frail older person, you might need help with lots of things to continue living independently at home.

Our communities in south east London are hugely varied and people face different challenges or need different services, depending on their circumstances.

We know that local people have different experiences and health outcomes based on where they live and other factors including their gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity.

The current health and care system

Our current health and care services aren’t always designed in a way to meet these needs. Most services focus on treating people when they get sick, rather than helping people to stay healthy in the first place.

Services that help people with their physical health are often separate to other services that provide care and support, including mental health and social care services. This means it’s a struggle to coordinate well across these services and make the best use of staff and resources.

If you have several problems, you can go from one service to the next, retelling your story, getting different advice, rather than getting support from a single joined up team.

Older lady climbing the stairs

Young woman getting support with wheelchair.

Working to change things for the better

We have been working, in partnership, to improve health and care services for a number of years. Recently there have been changes to the health and care system to create new formal partnerships called Integrated Care Systems (ICS).

These will help us to deliver this improvement in care for people, whether that’s in their neighbourhood, borough or across south east London.

What does the Integrated Care System do and how does it work?

South East London’s Integrated Care System brings together all the organisations responsible for delivering health and care for our communities.

If we work together, we can intervene faster and earlier to keep people well, making better use of specialist skills and equipment. We can offer more joined up support for people facing significant challenges.

This way, we can address problems faster and develop more effective solutions for local people.

ICS staff and patients on map of south east London

Working in partnership with your community

We will work more closely with local people and communities to understand what’s important to them, so we can tailor our work to what local people want and need.

There will be plenty of opportunities for local people and communities to feed into this important work. Find out how you can get involved.

How we organise ourselves

On 6 January 2023 all Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) in England published organograms of their organisation’s teams and structures. Find out more.

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