The Hampshire and Isle of Wight VCSE Health and Care Alliance (HIVCA) is an emerging collaboration between VCSE organisations across Hampshire (including Portsmouth and Southampton) and the Isle of Wight, established to facilitate the integration of the VCSE sector with the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System.
What is a VCSE alliance?
NHS England has said each new Integrated Care System* should have a way for the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector to be an equal partner.
*(You can find out about HIOW ICS here (opens in new tab)
- Develop a system-level VCSE alliance or leadership group and establishing a formal or transitional agreement for the VCSE to embed in ICS structures, relevant workstreams and/or strategy groups and place based or neighbourhood-level groups;
- Continue to develop and support active two-way communication and feedback mechanisms between the NHS and VCSE sector at system, place and neighbourhood levels, ensuring that the voices of the VCSE sector are amplified and that VCSE organisations/groups are able to feed in in a way that’s most appropriate for them;
- Ensuring the VCSE alliances/ leadership groups are inclusive i.e. representing organisations of all sizes and diverse communities, including those with protected characteristics or that experience health inequalities.
HIVCA assembly, leadership committee and representatives
HIVCA assembly is for all VCSE organisations across HIOW who have an interest in helping to shape health and social care with our partners in other sectors. There are currently around 130 member organisations, representing a spread across the geography, organisations of all shapes and sizes, and from different themes/communities that the VCSE structured HIVCA around. These are: Carers, Children and Young People, Gendered Health, Mental Health, Minoritised Communities, Neurodiversity and Learning Difference, Older People, and Physical disability.
The leadership committee are now in place. So are the thematic / community representatives for Children and Young People and Mental Health.
A number of ad hoc representatives have also been involved in a range of working groups, including engagement work, planning the ICP assemblies and helping to showcase VCSE activity, hospital discharge board, digital inclusion work, and much more.
Current key aims
- The Leadership Committee are busy working with partners from the Integrated Care Partnership joint committee, including health, social care, fire service, police and others, to develop a memorandum of understanding. This is to set up effective ways of working so that we can together make a real difference for communities.
- We are developing a business plan and exploring sustainable funding
Do you want to get involved?
If you're a VCSE organisation operating anywhere in Hampshire and Isle of Wight including Portsmouth and Southampton, we'd love you to join the HIVCA assembly. All VCSE organisations working across Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and/or Southampton are welcome to join the Assembly. Assembly members will have the opportunity to stand for leadership and thematic representative positions, to represent HIVCA where their expertise is relevant, to share their opinions and vote and to participate in Assembly events.
If you're from a different sector and would like to explore how you can work with HIVCA for strategy, design or delivery of services, or you'd like to engage more effectively with HIOW communities, please get in touch.
About HIVCA
HIVCA's Vision
Our vision is that the people of Hampshire and Isle of Wight can live healthy, active, independent lives full of connection and contribution within their communities for as long as possible and that health, and social care support is well integrated into people’s lives to support the best recovery and care.
HIVCA's Mission
Our Mission is to play an active role in the HIoWICS and bring our collective specialist expertise to:
- Focus on prevention and early action as well as lasting impact
- Creating social value that tackles inequalities that impact on health in our communities
- Provide a direct link to communities and their experience of health needs so that solutions are built around them
- Demonstrate the value of collaboration and working across and beyond organisational boundaries to bring change
HIVCA's Values
Our values are key to how we work together as a sector and have been identified through discussion. In our work as HIVCA we will be:
Inclusive: It is essential we include voices and experience from across all our communities so that health inequalities can be countered in partnership with these they impact on.
Community-led: We will advocate for community and remind partners that meeting health needs within communities will require scaling down as well as scaling up.
Strategic: The ‘wider’ determinants of health are the core of being and staying well; housing, diet, exercise, family, social connections, feeling useful and being listened to. This is what we do. We will move beyond transactional service delivery and bring our strategic voice to the ICS.
Asset-based: HIVCA members work with people and communities in a way that recognises their whole lives – not just their ill health – and we believe this hold the key for transformational health gain.
Trust: Honesty, trust, and trusted information are important to making such a system work and, if a VCSE partner is not delivering, or is not managing its conflicts of interest in a transparent way it will be held to account