South West London CCG Annual Report and Accounts 2020/21

with and consider the needs of their local communities. A single CCG could better support this ambition by enabling health and care organisations to collaborate, consider the needs of local communities and transform and improve services with partners to deliver local health and care priorities. Our initial work programme for the new South West London CCG was obviously disrupted due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but nevertheless our ambitions around collaborative working were realised and enhanced. The national NHS Long Term Plan had also been clear in 2019 that NHS organisations should work more closely together, rather than in competition: meaning the end of the ‘NHS internal market’ or the purchaser/ provider split. This signalled the end to NHS organisations having to administer complex negotiations, contract monitoring and payment regimes at local level, the rationale being that a single NHS South West London CCG could re-direct this resource from bureaucracy back to frontline services for patients. The six CCG Governing Bodies agreed that by moving to collaboration and away from competition, we could better drive-up quality and reduce variation in standards and deliver better health and care outcomes for the people in every one of our boroughs. We had already been working together as six CCGs and agreed that it supported better health and care outcomes of local people. We had also been successful in previous years when we had worked together as six CCGs to secure national funding for our local South West London services. Some of the examples included: • £10.1 million for children and young people’s mental health services to create enhanced mental health support teams (£3.7 million in 2020/21, further to £6.4 million between 2018 and 2020) • £1.6 million helped new and expectant mums in South West London to access specialist mental health teams • £9.9 million helped us share patients’ health and care records between organisations across South West London and gave local people better joined-up care We had already aligned some of our CCGs’ decision-making with the ‘Effective Commissioning Initiative’ and improved some of our back-office functions by bringing them together across the six organisations with reduced management overheads but improved quality, resilience and professional accountability. We believed that a merger would be better for our CCG staff – with more career progression across a bigger organisation, and with more opportunities for training and development, as well as strengthening our ability to retain our expert staff. The CCG delivered on the commitment to engage with our staff through the merger and minimise compulsory redundancies resulting from the process. We had fewer than five compulsory redundancies as a result of the CCG merger. The CCG engaged with and discussed the Annual Report and Accounts 2020/21 | 13