What Is Healthier Together?

The Healthier Together programme brings together 12 organisations that deliver healthcare services across the South East Midlands. It is looking at the services provided in the five main hospitals in Bedford, Kettering, Luton & Dunstable, Milton Keynes and Northampton. The programme is being led by hospital consultants, GPs and health professionals working together with patients and local people.

Healthier Together is about:

Improving local health services. However, it is also about making sure these have a long-term future. We must make the best use of the expertise we have in all our hospitals.
Maintaining services that are excellent. But also improving services wherever necessary to meet the latest and highest quality standards
Continuing to deliver the majority of day to day services from all five hospitals. Including accident & emergency and maternity care.
Providing as much care as possible close to home, but recognising that there may be extra travel for some ‘one-off procedures’ or specialist care. The evidence tells that pooling expertise and technologies into specialist centres helps patients get the best results.
Making sure that local doctors, healthcare professionals and patient and public representatives lead our health improvement plans
Actively involving you - the patients and public - in shaping any new proposals too. No changes will be made without giving you a chance to have your say.

Healthier Together covers:

Healthier Together covers the five NHS hospital trusts providing services for people living in the South East Midlands area: Bedford Hospital NHS Trust, Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Luton & Dunstable Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Milton Keynes Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust.

Our focus is on services for people with long term conditions (such as diabetes), maternity care, children’s care, planned care including general surgery, cancer care, and emergency and urgent services.

The five NHS trust hospitals in the South East Midlands have a lot in common; they also face the same challenges. Healthier Together is about ensuring our services have a long-term future, making the best use we can of the knowledge and skills of our healthcare professionals and the funding our services receive.

Our priority now is to develop proposals for how to change these services for the better. This work is being led by our clinicians and we are actively seeking your views, so tell us what you think.

You can visit the Governance Structure page to see how the Healthier Together programme is being managed and who is involved.

Healthier Together timeline:

The Healthier Together programme began in the summer of 2011 and will run through until spring 2015. The programme covers four phases, as illustrated in the diagram below: