The NHS 10 Year Plan was launched last month, setting out some bold intentions: shifting focus to prevention, strengthening neighbourhood working, and bringing services closer to where people live. It’s genuinely exciting to see these themes getting national attention and emerging as actual policy.

For almost 15 years in England and Wales, LAC has been quietly doing what the plan now calls for – building trust, walking alongside people, and helping them find their own solutions to what can often be perceived as very intractable and difficult health and social care challenges. We’ve seen time and time again the incredible change that can happen when you start from the common-sense practice of working with people where they’re at, recognising their strengths, drawing on the natural support of those around them, and ensuring services are complementary to that person or family’s vision for a better life.

It feels like we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity with this plan to push for a philosophy of personalised care that really centres the person and family at the heart of that decision-making. We need neighbourhood working to be interpreted as a shift in power and practice rather than efficiency or a new layer of care management because, at the end of the day, what matters most surely isn’t more efficient services as a result of change – it’s better lives because of change. Doing this means embracing the conversation of starting with what matters to that person, not what’s easiest for the system. It means seeing people as citizens in their own right, not as passive recipients of services. It means making space for relational work that doesn’t always fit neatly into a commissioning framework or team structure.

We are hopeful that the 10 Year Plan opens up a very important window for this change and a chance to show that there’s another way of working. Local Area Coordination isn’t the whole answer of course, but it offers a vital and often missing piece of the puzzle – a way of grounding these big ambitions in the everyday lives, strengths, and aspirations of people.

Nick Sinclair,
Local Area Coordination Network Director