Background and policy context
Across England, the NHS has been shifting towards more joined‑up, community‑based care. This direction was set out in the 2022 Fuller Stocktake, which called for neighbourhood teams that bring different professionals together to help people stay healthy for longer, support those with complex needs, and make it easier for people to get advice and care close to home. The vision, subsequently outlined in the NHS 10-year plan, highlighted the need for simpler, more coordinated services that wrap around local communities.
Camden has a long history of partnership working at neighbourhood level, predating more recent national health policy moves in this direction. In 2020 a Health and Care Citizen’s Assembly helped shape the council’s Neighbourhood’s Programme’, and in response to this and recommendations in the Fuller Stocktake report, health and care partner organisations in Camden began to develop the East Integrated Neighbourhood Team (East INT) — a new way of working that brings health, social care and community organisations together as one team serving the same local area.
Development of the East INT
The initiative began in late 2023, when Camden’s integrated care partners invested in local leadership and selected the East neighbourhood as a “test and learn” site. The Fuller Stocktake was not prescriptive about approach; rather, place-based partnerships were instead encouraged to act with discretion and creativity, targeting areas of mutually agreed opportunity. Camden’s approach emphasised agile testing and iterative learning, with an initial focus on staff experience. It advocated for a bottom-up approach that gave staff and operational managers license to lead the change. They would retain their clinical and professional identities, but join a wider community of teams defined more by place than employer.
Throughout 2024, Adult Social Care and CNWL Camden Integrated Community Health (CICH) reorganised their services around neighbourhood boundaries, and by October 2024 both teams were co‑located at Kentish Town Health Centre. Mental health colleagues from the Kentish Town Core Team (NLFT) also joined the work despite being based elsewhere. As relationships developed, a range of other teams became involved, such as primary care colleagues (GP neighbourhood champions), Focus CareLink (homecare and reablement), Reach Out Camden (VCSE mental health), Change Grow Live (drug and alcohol support). In addition, the work reached across to LBC Housing services, Family Hubs and voluntary sector organisations coordinated through Kentish Town Connects.
Components of the East INT
Partner organisations agreed to test new ways of working around existing caseloads, focusing on staff experience and removing barriers to joint working. Focussing on relational practice and better coordinated ways of working, a range of new ways of working were co-designed by staff and managers, some of which are now embedded in staffs’ weekly routines. New ways of working included:
East Camden Working Together Session, fortnightly.
East INT Lunch & Learns and Learning Hours, ad hoc.
East INT Retrospectives, every eight weeks.
East INT Managers’ check in, fortnightly.
East INT Duty Desk
Hoarding Community of Practice, every two months.
East Camden Housing Clinic, every month at Holmes Road Depot.
Launchpad, a new initiative led by local VCSE sector mental health cohorts of recently discharged secondary mental health patients into the community, hosted at Kentish Town Health Centre
Evaluating the East INT
Due to the highly iterative nature of the East INT, with new ways of working being developed and tweaked over time, the approach to evaluation was less than straightforward. The significant number of stakeholders and emergent nature of INTs meant it was challenging to develop a robust theory of change. An evaluation framework went through a series of iterations, and this ultimately organised evaluation activities into distinct work packages which captured impact in different ways. This work is captured in the report below. Of these, descriptions of staff members’ stories of ‘most significant change’ highlighted the positive cultural and relational impacts of the initiative. A staff survey that was conducted in November 2024 and Novemeber 2025 showed improvement across nine of thirteen survey questions, with free text responses again highlighting benefits. Quantitative signal indicators were also analysed following engagement with service managers on key metrics. However, the signal indicators did not show significant change relative to the other neighbourhoods within the time period of the pilot. Finally, a public health registrar at LSHTM conducted a realist evaluation of the East INT, which surfaced some of the ongoing systemic challenges encountered by the East INT, for example, around infrastructure, staff capacity, leadership resource. As neighbourhood teams are being expanded to the other parts of Camden as well as nationally, the learning from this evaluation can help to shape next steps in the journey towards more integrated and locally responsive place-based care in communities.
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