Looking ahead

Collaboration remains central to the NHS’s ambition to deliver more integrated, place based and population focused care. Our interviews with the managing directors of acute provider collaboratives show clear evidence that when providers work together at scale, they can deliver meaningful improvements in performance, productivity and service redesign, and provide an important mechanism for building additional system-level capacity to meet priorities.

Although provider collaboratives are not specifically referenced in recent national guidance, they continue to offer a credible and effective approach for providers seeking to work together to unlock system wide issues and improve care. The shift toward a more flexible national approach, one that places greater emphasis on local autonomy, creates space for systems to determine where collaboratives add the greatest value. This is empowering providers and systems to establish collaborative arrangements that genuinely fit their context, relationships and priorities.

The strengths of provider collaboratives lie in their ability to bring organisations together to act collectively where it matters most: improving access, redesigning pathways and addressing shared operational pressures at scale. They are most effective when focused, empowered and built on strong, trusting relationships between partners. Increasingly, collaboratives are playing a pivotal role in workforce and infrastructure planning, maximising operational capacity, and enabling more flexible use of resources across organisational boundaries. Managing directors of provider collaboratives tell us that realising this potential consistently requires clarity of role, strong leadership, delegated authority and the right enabling conditions.

Looking ahead, collaboratives are already well positioned to support neighbourhood level models, redesign pathways across care settings, coordinate demand and patient flow, and lead system level decisions on service design, quality and access. In the context of delivery of the 10YHP, provider collaboratives offer a flexible, locally driven and proven approach to tackling the challenges ahead, one that enables providers to shape solutions together and deliver better care for the populations they serve.

If you would like more information on this work, please contact emma.fulton@thenhsalliance.org