Putting money where our mouth is?: Exploring health inequalities funding across systems
24 March 2024
- When integrated care system (ICS) leaders were surveyed in 2023, tackling inequalities ranked as the primary ambition leaders would like to have achieved in five years’ time. Yet one in five ICSs stated that they did not feel confident in their ability to tackle inequalities, and none were ‘very confident’.
- In response, the NHS Confederation, in partnership with the Care Quality Commission, Clarity Consulting and Leeds Beckett University, undertook a project to understand how systems are approaching efforts to tackle inequalities.
- The project focused on how the ringfenced health inequalities allocation was spent. Informed by interviews with health inequalities (HI) leads across England, the project explored how HI funding was allocated, the decision-making processes involved and the barriers and enablers of change.
- HI leads offered reflections on the activities the ringfenced funding has been used for and insights on the role of data and evidence as part of decision-making. They identified critical enablers of progress in tackling health inequalities, which included leadership, governance and relationships. Indeed, strong leadership was seen as a more important driver for change than ringfencing. As such, an ongoing commitment to recurrent funding in the baseline (ie not ringfenced) is helpful.
- Tackling health inequalities is a long-standing and complex challenge. Based on the insights from HI leads across the country, this report puts forward a number of recommendations – nationally and locally – to support further progress. It is accompanied by a practical toolkit, developed for system leaders across England, on how to implement high-impact changes to address health inequalities.