Health and Wellbeing Hub

We host the regional VCSE Partnership Programme, one of 42 alliances across England created to ensure that the VCSE sector is embedded at all levels of the NHS Integrated Care Systems (ICS). Working in partnership with Cumbria CVS, VONNE leads and delivers the integration and enables the VCSE sector to shape and inform the ICS into a system which works for everyone.

Here we explain what is happening in health and care and how it is changing in the North East and North Cumbria. Learn more about the Integrated Care System (ICS) in our region, its aims and priorities, regional structures and voluntary and community sector representation.

We’re the lead body for the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB) Healthy Communities and Social Prescribing Workstream, managing the delivery plan for this funding. Our Infrastructure Investment Programme is supporting place-based investment in VCSE infrastructure to facilitate better connections, collaboration and delivery in terms of social prescribing.

Our Health Champions project is linking the NHS with grassroots voluntary sector organisations and communities, listening and investing in their expertise to help shape health services and messaging ensuring the most marginalised communities are reached, having a direct effect on tackling healthcare inequalities in our region.

Research plays a key role in developing better care and treatments to address our health and wellbeing needs. Community involvement in research can help identify the most important topics for research and the best ways of researching them. This support, hosted by VONNE, is bringing together the skills and expertise of VCSE and research partners to ensure greater diversity of communities involved in research through long-lasting, reciprocal partnerships and a growing number of projects driven by community views.

For cross-sector collaboration across our Integrated Care System (ICS) to be successful, it’s important that all system partners involved have a good baseline understanding of each other. There's a lot of different terminology to contend with when working together. So we've compiled a glossary of some key terms that you may come across when working with and across health and care systems and the VCSE sector. Please do share this glossary with colleagues who you think may find it useful.