Integrated Neighbourhood Teams (INTs): Community Engagement Report
Healthwatch Lambeth undertook a comprehensive programme of community engagement to explore how Lambeth people and communities believe the three shifts set out in the NHS 10 Year Plan—Hospital to Community, Analogue to Digital, and Treatment to Prevention—could be delivered through Lambeth Integrated Neighbourhood Teams (INTs).
A total of 356 individuals contributed through workshops, a borough-wide survey, focus groups, and interviews, capturing the experiences of people with diverse and often complex overlapping health and care needs.
Findings
People strongly support the ambition underpinning INTs to deliver more coordinated, community-based care. They recognised the potential benefits of bringing care closer to home, improving the use of digital tools, and focusing more on prevention. However, they were clear that these shifts will only work if services become more joined-up, accessible, inclusive, and trusted.
Different communities had distinct barriers, priorities, and levels of unmet need, reinforcing the importance of designing INTs to be flexible and responsive to diverse needs.
Our findings suggest that Integrated Neighbourhood Teams have the potential to improve care in Lambeth if they are designed around lived experience. People want a model that brings services together, reduces the burden on individuals and families, provides practical and preventative support, offers genuine choice in how people access care, works closely with trusted VCSE partners, and demonstrates how people’s voices have shaped change.
Recommendations
From resident feedback, we developed the following recommendations for Integrated Neighbourhood teams.
- Provide joined-up, coordinated care with clear pathways, named contacts, and better communication between services.
- Bring care closer to home through trusted, accessible community locations, local specialist advice, and better follow-up, reducing unnecessary travel and hospital use.
- Maintain hybrid access by ensuring digital tools are available but do not replace face-to-face, telephone, and supported access routes.
- Make prevention central to neighbourhood care through regular health checks, free or low-cost social and physical activities, mental wellbeing support, nutrition advice, falls prevention, and support with wider determinants of health.
- Build trust and inclusion by listening to people, taking concerns seriously, recognising carers and family members as partners, and designing services that are culturally safe and accessible.
- Work closely with voluntary and community organisations that people already know and trust.
- Embed people’s voice and co-production with them into the design, delivery, and evaluation of INTs, showing people how their experiences have shaped change.
You can download the report in full below.
Download the report
What are Integrated Neighbourhood Teams?
In Lambeth and across the country, the NHS is working closely with local councils, voluntary groups and community organisations to develop and deliver neighbourhood health services, in line with the ambitions set out in the national 10 Year Health Plan.
Neighbourhood working will transform how we support people’s health and wellbeing by bringing more care closer to home and making services easier to access. It will help people live healthier, more independent lives and reduce unnecessary hospital visits by providing joined-up, personalised care.
Neighbourhood working will work through Integrated Neighbourhood Teams, which will integrate staff from health, social care and voluntary services into a single local team responsible for delivering seamless and coordinated care in a specific neighbourhood. The aim is to provide care that responds not just to clinical needs, but to the full range of a person’s physical, mental, emotional and social needs.