Across England, areas are working to integrate services through greater collaboration. The NHS Long Term Plan set out that every area is expected to become an ‘integrated care system’ (ICS) by 2021. In ICSs commissioners and providers discuss how they can work together to oversee and manage improvements in services and health outcomes for local people within their collective budget. ICSs vary in size, but in general, an ICS will operate across a larger population than that covered by any individual provider.

The Integrated Care Provider (ICP) Contract is one of the available options for systems to enable joined up decision making and integration of services. It will enable commissioners to award a single contract to a provider that is responsible for the integrated provision of general practice, wider NHS and potentially local authority services.

Following previous engagement, NHS England consulted on proposed contracting arrangements for ICPs in 2018 (with accompanying draft supporting materials). We published our response to the consultation in March 2019, and the updated ICP Contract and supporting documents are now available below.

The House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee (HSCC) has recommended that “the law should rule out the option of non-statutory providers holding an Integrated Care Provider Contract”. In recognition of this recommendation, and our expectation that ICP Contracts will be held by statutory bodies, we have published a version of the ICP Contract suitable for award to statutory bodies only. A response to the HSCC’s report will be published in due course.

NHS England/Improvement is committed to ensuring a controlled and incremental approach to the adoption of the ICP Contract.

We will continue to work with commissioners in the most advanced areas to support their use of the contract. If you would like to discuss use of the contract, please contact us at nhscb.contractshelp@nhs.net.

The current version of the ICP Contract is the 2019/20 edition and is available here.

We are updating the ICP Contract in line with the 2020/21 NHS Standard Contract and it will be available shortly.

The NHS Standard Contract is available here.

Resources

• Template GP Integration Agreement – FAQs
• Template GP Integration Agreement for partially integrated ICPs
• Template Local Authority Agreement – FAQs
• Template Local Authority Integration Agreement
• Procurement and assurance approach
• GP participation in an ICP
• CCG roles where ICPs are commissioned
• Integrated budgets overview
• Contract package Questions and Answers
• About the Integrated Care Provider Contract – Easy Read
• Contracting arrangements for ICPs: Equality and health inequalities analysis

Instead of bringing services together under one contract (for example, the ICP Contract as above), some areas may choose to use an ‘alliance’ approach – whereby commissioners and providers may choose to put in place an overlaying agreement (an ‘alliance agreement) supplementing the providers’ individual contracts with the commissioner and formalising their collaboration. This agreement can describe shared processes, goals and incentives, and set up a joint forum for discussion of what is best for the population and for the achievement of the defined goals, and how budgets and resources can best be used to those ends. We have developed a template alliance agreement to support those areas which will be available on request.

GP participation videos

The ICP Contract and alliance approaches can support different types of whole population care models – such as the multi-specialty community provider (MCP) and integrated primary and acute care systems (PACS) models, which were originally developed through a number of vanguard sites across England.

We have produced a series of videos which seek to portray what it’s like to be a GP in a multispecialty community provider (MCP) and to support GPs to learn more about MCPs, linking to themes identified in the ICP GP participation document.

The videos are based on the GPs’ own views. They are site specific and aim to demonstrate the experience each area has had. In the videos, the GPs reflect on the circumstances which led their practice to consider a new model of care and why they believe that making these changes will help to sustain general practice for the future.

There are six videos in total: five covering individual themes and one looking at the national picture.