Health and social care partners

We work with a wide range of partners to ensure people with health and social care needs have access to appropriate care and support, and achieve the most positive outcome.

We work closely with NHS Barnet to ensure that the different services that people use are joined up and efficient. Health staff work within our community teams, and we also have joint decision-making boards with health, see our partnership board pages for more information. Recent changes within the NHS including the transfer of responsibilities for public health to the council and the advent of clinical or GP commissioning has led to an integration of some of our commissioning arrangements.

These developments are consistent with the council's commitment to a 'One Barnet' approach - joining up the public sector across health, the police, voluntary and private sector service providers to produce a better outcome for Barnet residents.

Barnet residents also play a key part in helping us develop and deliver our care plans. Their views, experiences of using our services and involvement is really important to us and is integral in shaping future services.

We work with many other council departments to improve health and social care, including Housing, Environment and Regeneration, Transport, Libraries and the Children's service. Good examples of joint working across departments include the delivery of new supported housing for vulnerable people, making transport work better, and ensuring young disabled people have a smooth transition into Adults and Communities from the Children's services.

We also work with other authorities and want to learn from good practice elsewhere. We work within our sub-regional body, the West London Strategic Alliance, but also work with the North London Strategic Alliance on areas of shared interest. 

As well as commissioning services from providers and maintaining a focus on quality, value for money and positive outcomes, we also work in strategic partnership with providers. Providers are represented on our Partnership Boards and sub-groups, and we aim to build good relationships with providers utilising our Provider Forum and other meetings and opportunities. See our providers page for more information.