The Met Office and UK Health Security Agency have announced a amber cold-health alert for the East of England. This alert is now in effect from 10AM on 06/01/2026 until 12PM on 11/01/2026.

Cold weather can affect anyone, and certain groups are particularly vulnerable. These include older people (aged 65 years and over), pregnant women, young children (particularly those aged 5 and under), and people with long term health conditions such as cardiovascular or respiratory disease, or a mental health condition.

For guidance on staying warm and well, visit our cold weather advice page.

What do we do?

The Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System (MSE ICS) provides health and care to 1.2 million residents across the region.

Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System’s vision is for a health and care partnership working for a better quality of life in a thriving mid and south Essex, with every resident making informed choices in a strengthened health and care system.

Made up of two statutory bodies, the Integrated Care Board (ICB) – an NHS organisation responsible for strategic partnerships and new collaborative ways of working – and the Integrated Care Partnership (ICP)– a committee of stakeholder partners.

In collaboration with health and care partners within the NHS, local authority, borough and district councils, Healthwatch organisations, voluntary and community sector associations, ambulance trust and primary care networks; MSE ICS can continue to build upon the long history of collaborative working to design and deliver services that will achieve better health and social care outcomes and experiences for people who live and work in our area.

Our vision

A health and care partnership working for a better quality of life in a thriving mid and south Essex, with every resident enabled to make informed choices in a strengthened health and care system.​

Our purpose

To improve the health and wellbeing of the people living in mid and south Essex, including reducing health inequalities.​

Our mission

  • We will lead the system with our partners and communities.​
  • We will develop plans in partnership, oversee their delivery and seek assurance that we are improving the health of the people of mid and south Essex, whilst reducing health inequalities. ​
  • We will be excellent stewards of our resources including our workforce, now and for the future. 

Ambitions

Our ambitions underpin our new way of working and aim to tackle the challenges we face as a community. To do this we must reduce health inequalities and improve patient outcomes, increase efficiency, reduce duplication, and improve job satisfaction for staff. The benefit of integration means we can work in partnership at every level to:

1. Create Opportunities

For our communities to thrive we need good education, opportunities for employment, decent housing and a vibrant local economy. Our Partnership represents some of the largest employers and purchasers of goods and services locally, so we have an important role to play. By working together, we can harness these opportunities for the benefit of local residents.

2. Support Health and Wellbeing

By working in different ways and in closer partnership with our communities we can do more to prevent the things that cause poor health and mental illness. Up to 40 per cent of ill health can be avoided so by getting a grip on issues sooner we can stop them becoming bigger problems in the future.

3. Bring Care Closer to Home

Joining up our different health, care and voluntary sector services means we can bring services closer people’s homes – whether that is through support on-line, or by bringing health and care services into the community, such as some hospital outpatient appointments, tests like x-rays and blood tests and support for people living with long term conditions like diabetes or breathing problems.

4. Improve and Transform Our Services

We want to make sure our residents have the highest chances of recovery from their illness or condition, and to give them the best treatment we can. Demand for services is changing as people grow older and live with more long-term conditions and there is much more we could do with technology, medical advances and new ways of working to treat people at an earlier stage and avoid more serious illness.

Our priorities

Recovering from the impact of COVID-19 will remain a priority for months and years to come, as our health and care system works to reduce the backlog of treatment and bring down waiting lists again.

We have also identified three system strategic priorities to achieve our goals.

  • To bring together frontline teams and other leaders across our health and care system in an approach we call Stewardship . Our stewards will help to ensure the best use of every partnership pound. This approach involves greater emphasis on population health management, a way of working to help frontline teams understand current health and care needs and predict what local people will need in the future. This means we can tailor better care and support for individuals, design more joined-up and sustainable health and care services and make better use of public resources.
  • To improve the recruitment, retention, performance and wellbeing of our workforce. We want to implement changes that will make our colleagues feel valued and our ICS a distinctive, attractive and successful place to work, thereby reducing our reliance on temporary agency staff.

To ensure a long-term focus on the actions needed to support children and young people. Early action to promote and protect their health and wellbeing can reap benefits for decades in the future.

See our Five Year Strategy and Delivery Plan for more information.

Find out who is a partner of our ICS.