Hounslow's SEND System.

The London Borough of Hounslow asked Collaborate to support the Integrated Health and Care Partnership on one of its newer priority areas: helping to shape the development of a new collaborative vision and whole system working to support children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) — including strengthening shared accountability, developing culturally-responsive support for young people and a building a more collaborative workforce.

The Partnership brought together the Council, NHS bodies and the voluntary sector, and Collaborate led work designed to strengthen effective foundations for collaboration among these partners: a recognition of the maturity of their partnership, a stronger sense of shared purpose, a broad lens on the determinants of health and well-being, and better relationships among the senior leadership.

We achieved this through an initial diagnostic approach, interviewing stakeholders from across the system, from senior leaders to clinicians on the ground to understand people’s priorities and agendas, and what they needed at different levels of the health system. We fed our findings to the Board to take on some of these recommendations to build on their ongoing work and set foundations to build on. 

We facilitated workshops with the senior leaders with a focus on strengthening the key foundations for place-based health and care through developing a clear shared vision and deepening relationships and trust through honest and personal conversations. In particular conversations we held with SEND Parents proved the most valuable, as it spoke to the core issues at play and how everyone wanted to play the part to support the children as best they could. A shared purpose. 

We brought tricky issues into the room and enabled productive discussions among senior leaders, laying the foundations for both a collaborative mindset and practicalities involved for better working relationships and collaboration. We helped the partnership widen its lens from a relatively narrow focus on improving NHS services to a wider view of the determinants of health and prevention, while also strengthening action in the current workstreams.