NHS South West London Annual Report and Accounts 2022/23

About this report

The NHS South West London Integrated Care Board (ICB) Annual Report for July 2022 to March 2023 has been produced in response to the NHS England requirements as published in the Department of Health and Social Care Group Accounting Manual 2022/23. The structure closely follows that outlined in the guidance and includes three core sections:

• Performance Report – including an overview, performance analysis and performance measures
• Accountability Report – including the members’ report, corporate governance report, annual governance statement, remuneration and staff report
• Annual Accounts – including the independent auditor’s report and financial statements

All the content has been checked for accuracy and consistency with reporting data sources and to make sure that all requirements are met by our auditors.

Welcome and overview

Welcome to the first annual report for NHS South West London Integrated Care Board. This report is a record of our first nine months of operation from 1 July 2022 to 31 March 2023.

As the NHS in South West London, our collaborative approach has helped us maintain our position as a high performing system in London, and ensured we perform well against NHS targets and priorities, including referral to treatment times, elective care and vaccination delivery. There is no hiding from the fact that this is a challenging time for health and care services, but we are recovering well from pandemic, and we will continue to work together to improve further.

In South West London we are proud to now be operating as an Integrated Care System, with both our Integrated Care Board and Integrated Care Partnership working together to improve health and care across our boroughs. Over the last few years, particularly during the pandemic, the NHS in South West London, local councils and the voluntary sector demonstrated what we can achieve by working together, quickly identifying and supporting those at greatest risk. We know that by working together with a shared ambition to help our communities thrive, we can achieve the best for everyone who lives and works in South West London.

We are fortunate to have such strong relationships with our partners forged through working closely together over a long time. We are proud to lead such a well-developed system and look forward to our partnership growing stronger over the coming months and years.

Tackling health inequalities is one of our core commitments. We are proud of our existing work and want to build on this at system, place and neighbourhood level to continue to reduce health inequalities, especially at a time where more people continue to be impacted by the current cost of living crisis.

What we do and how we do it has to be aligned to what matters most to our residents. Together with our people and communities we shape local health services and the care that we provide. We are clear we must do this in partnership with our communities, as it is essential that local people are at centre of every decision we take.  

Without doubt this has been the most challenging winter in NHS history, we continue to recover from the pandemic, maintain patient safety through industrial action whilst supporting our staff and colleagues.  Health and care organisations across South West London work closely together to increase capacity and our clinicians continue to lead the work to find new and better ways to make services more efficient and effective for patients. We are particularly proud of our achievements to reduce waiting times for elective and cancer care, but we know we have much more to do and we will continue to focus our efforts on this with our provider collaboratives. 

The last few years have shown us that when we come together, we can make real and tangible improvements to the health of local people. We look forward to achieving more together.

Finally, we wanted to mark our first annual report by thanking our Integrated Care Board and Partnership, all of our partners from across the NHS, local authorities, Healthwatches and the voluntary sector, for your hard work and commitment in supporting our communities across South West London.

Sarah Blow

Chief Executive Officer
NHS South West London Integrated Care Board
South West London Integrated Care System