Working across health and care systems

We have experience of working across the whole health and care system and bringing multiple partners together to achieve a shared vision. Our customers are kept well informed of future developments in policy, practice and evidence that may affect their plans.

We use our position as a system leader to maintain strategic and operational relationships, so we are best placed to meet their needs. We respond to our customers with an ongoing loop of intelligence discovery and sharing, based on:

• Our ‘bottom-up’ understanding of how services are being delivered from our close, day-to-day work with CCGs, providers and system leaders and users on the ground. We then share our learning nationally. For example, we chair a CSU industry group and enjoy strong professional relationships with NHS England, universities and the National Institute for Health Research
• Our ‘top-down’ understanding of the national and regional contexts in which we work and the latest developments in health and care. We use this knowledge to ensure that national policy shapes the objectives and outcomes of our service improvement work.

We maintain close and effective relationships with arm’s length bodies (ALBs) and adopt the principles of the code of good practice between departments and ALBs to achieve appropriate levels of engagement.

As a proactive member of several collaborative forums, we promote innovative and pioneering ideas in patient care. Together with the experts in our e-innovation unit and Strategy Unit, we act as an authoritative voice on how to identify, invest in, develop and implement new ideas.

We continually research the latest developments in legislation and regulatory and statutory requirements. We provide routine customer briefings and compile a compendium of policy news.

We carefully follow an independent service auditor process that identifies and implements rigorous control objectives for our business processes. NHSE recognises our achievements and we now peer review other CSUs.