Local authorities throughout England have signed up to join a network of early implementers of Health and Wellbeing Boards. The boards will remove divisions between the NHS and local authorities and give communities greater say in the services needed to provide care for local people.

The boards will bring together those who buy services across the NHS, public health, social care and children’s services, elected representatives and representatives from HealthWatch to plan the right services for their area. They will look at all health and care needs together, rather than creating artificial divisions between services.

Many local authorities already have projects in place to integrate services, including:

• combining health and social care support for dementia suffers to reduce hospital readmissions
• improved communication between health and social care professionals to enhanced the support package offered to vulnerable members of the community
• fast-tracking learning by integrated public health teams in local authorities

Improved joint working should help ensure that each member of the Health and Wellbeing Board can draw on their strengths, whether that’s clinical expertise, local knowledge or understanding the needs of patients and the public, to help shape commissioning strategies to meet local needs.

It is hoped that all local authorities will have shadow boards in place by April 2012. Fully-fledged boards will be up and running in April 2013 at the same time as clinical commisioning groups take on responsibility for the NHS budget, subject to Parliamentary approval.