What's the deal?

Back in the days when I sat outside this sector as an MK resident, I had little understanding of the local health and social care system, what different parts of it did, how it affected me and how I could have a say in how it could be designed and delivered.

Here at Healthwatch Milton Keynes, we live and breathe health and social care systems, transformation, policy, strategies and commissioning. We’re familiar with the jargon and acronyms of the NHS and other services in our everyday work, but we're always working hard to make this information more accessible for residents.

The MK Deal is a perfect example of this. 

So, what is the MK Deal?

The big news in 2022 was the NHS move from Clinical Commissioning Groups to Integrated Care Boards. To explain it most simply, the Integrated Care Board is responsible for contracting health and care services across Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes – known as Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes Integrated Care System (BLMK ICS).

You might see the word ‘Place’ mentioned a lot in Integrated Care System strategies and public communications.

Milton Keynes is considered a ‘Place’ within our Integrated Care System. NHS England has been clear, when designing ICSs, that ‘Places’ within these bigger geographical areas have the knowledge, expertise and the relationships with residents to design and deliver the right health and care services for their communities. The should have good control over how and where health funding is spent to deliver the best services, and the best health outcomes for residents.

The MK Deal is essentially the first stage of the Integrated Care Board handing more control to the leaders running health and care services in Milton Keynes. This means that local health and care leaders can spend health funding where it is most needed and where it will make the most difference to people in Milton Keynes.

The MK Deal will evolve over time, and likely take on more responsibility for funding local services in the future and this first stage sets out four priority areas, where Primary Care, our Hospital, Social Care and Mental Health services will work together to address four big challenges that the people of Milton Keynes face. The first two challenges are:

• Improving how we move through health and social care services -known as ‘system flow’ - and working together to ensure system flow works well.  For patients, good system flow means that we can get the care we need from our GPs when we need it, get into hospital quickly when we need to, get out of hospital when we no longer need to be there and that the right care is available for us in our homes and communities so that we can avoid the need for emergency service support.
• Delivering a range of improvements that support us as a community to be healthy and prevent obesity but also get good quality support when we do need to lose weight.

The two other priority areas are Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Managing Complex Needs which we will receive more information about in February.