NW London Statement - The end of SaHF and a new plan for North West London

From 2012 to March 2019, the NHS in North West London worked on a programme to re-shape services under the banner of Shaping a Healthier Future (SaHF). The programme delivered many of it aims including: urgent care centres in every borough of NW London; improvements to maternity care and emergency paediatric care; and a range of initiatives to help people get the specialist care they need closer to home without having to be admitted to hospital.

On the 26 March the Secretary of State announced the end of the SaHF programme. This announcement followed the publication of the NHS Long Term Plan, and our plans are now based on the Long Term Plan rather than SaHF. We will however continue to learn and incorporate lessons from the previous programme into future work.

Challenges still remain for health care services in NW London, including: the state of our estate and getting access to sufficient capital to invest in redevelopment. At the time the plans were developed, the financial situation was different, and more capital was available.

We will not be taking forward the plans set out in SaHF but we will however, still need to make changes across NW London, but we now have an opportunity to re-engage with our staff and residents about what the new plan should look like, based on the NHS Long Term Plan.

Outcomes of the project

We made significant progress in delivering key elements of our plan, such as the transformation of paediatric and maternity services in NW London, which has led to more specialised care in fewer settings. We have seen increased continuity of care and more children being treated without requiring a stay on a hospital ward. Our maternity services have since been awarded national funding to take forward more innovative programmes of work, for the rest of the country to learn from.

The SaHF programme also allowed us to provide urgent care in every borough of NW London and implement a range of initiatives to help people get the specialist care they need closer to home without having to be admitted to hospital.

Consultancy & costs

We have previously said on a number of occasions, that in the early stages of SaHF, we used external consultants with the required expertise to help us develop various elements such as modelling and business case development.

The NW London CCG’s spend on consultancies for the SaHF programme was £43m between April 2013, when we became CCGs, and March 2019. We are unable to verify consultancy costs prior to April 2013, as these would have been commissioned through predecessor bodies.

There are now strict controls on management consultancy expenditure, and we are not currently incurring consultancy costs for the development of our future plans, nor do we intend to.