ICS OH & EAP Project Management Support

South East London Integrated Care System (ICS) is made up of all the organisations that

are involved in planning and delivery of health and care for the 1.9 million people who live in

the six boroughs covered by the ICS.

SEL is facing a challenged funding and workforce shortage position and will be required to

deliver significant change including potential reshaping of the healthcare model to best utilise

available resources to support delivery of high-quality patient care.

Collaboration and standardisation of services will help achieve efficiencies.

The ICSs three Acute Trusts, Guy's and St Thomas, King's College Hospital, and Lewisham

& Greenwich NHS FT, the MH Trusts Oxleas and SLAM, the ICB office, and the Community

provider Bromley HC identified the potential for greater collaboration in the provision of

future models of transactional HR services (recruitment, payroll, HR Administration) and

temporary staffing services (bank and agency across the ICS footprint).

A deep dive review of transactional HR Service was completed in late 2021. The review

recommended Occupational Health (OH) and counselling services (included within

Employee Assistance Programmes, EAPs) as an area for prioritise collaboration.

In August 2022 a project was commissioned to undertake an options appraisal allowing

several different delivery model options to be explored and evaluated against a set of agreed

criteria, leading to the selection of the preferred option.

The criteria used was as follows:

 Desirability - the degree to which each option meets the strategic objectives and

priorities of stakeholders

 Viability - the degree to which each option is financially viable and sustainable

 Feasibility - the degree to which each option can be implemented

In November 2022 the SEL HRDS agreed recommendations to move to a single EAP

service (excluding SLAM and Oxleas who have recently commissioned new services) and

committed to a long term plan for the development of a 'at scale' single provider for OH

services across SEL ICS, (excluding SLAM and Oxleas). Learning from other ICB's who

have already adopted this approach will important to the success of the delivery of this

recommendation.