The Children and Families Act requires the Local Authority and the NHS to act consistently with the joint commissioning arrangements, to keep arrangements under review and to update them.

In Sefton the Health and Wellbeing Board has overall responsibility for joint commissioning arrangements between the NHS, the local authority and public health and has a role to:

• encourage integrated working between commissioners of health services, public health and social care services
• lead on the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) and Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy (JHWS)
• provide system leadership for change across care, health and wellbeing

Joint commissioning approaches will consider the whole system challenges of personalisation, personal budgets and resource allocation. In addition to this, strategic, costed and evidence-based decisions about early intervention will be identified to ensure shared outcomes. To this end the Local Authority and the NHS are working together to review current provision within children’s services. Current provision will be compared to the needs identified in the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) and we will then explore opportunities to commission services jointly.

Ultimately, the joint commissioning arrangements will ensure that the Local Authority and the NHS are able to secure education, health and care provision for all children and young people who have special educational needs and disabilities, including those who have an Education, Health and Care Plan.

The key elements of the Health and Wellbeing Strategy are to:

• Ensure all children have a positive start in life
• Support people early to prevent and treat avoidable illnesses and reduce inequalities in health
• Promote positive mental health and wellbeing
• Seek to address the wider social, environmental and economic issues that contribute to poor health and wellbeing
• Build capacity and resilience to empower and strengthen communities.

The principles underpinning this vision are:

• Build on the many assets and resources that are available, including social value
• Enable early intervention and prevention through robust arrangements for identifying those with needs, and predicting those whose needs may emerge due to changes in national policy such as Welfare Reform
• Address health inequalities and equity of access to narrow the gap between different neighbourhoods and communities
• secure value for money and consistency in the quality of care and support
• Demonstrate integrated health and social care service solutions, including the wider contribution the Council and partners can make
• Deliver discernible improvements to the agreed defined outcomes in this Strategy
• Make good use of existing strategic partnerships to address complex health and social care issues
• Use the authority of the Health and Wellbeing Board to enable and encourage partners to work together.