About us
Our North Thames Paediatric Network (NTPN) was set up in 2019/20 to bring together 24 provider organisations in the North London and North Thames region. Our aim was to ensure that the sickest children access the care they need as rapidly as possible, and as close to home as possible. Since then, to achieve this, we have all been working together innovating and improving our pathways of care, and hopefully making a real difference at the front line. Thank you very much to everyone taking part, including our 18 referral and 6 provider hospitals!
Our original remit was focused on critical care and surgery, but very quickly we recognised that to achieve real improvement we needed to extend our work streams more broadly across the paediatric and teenage/young adult field. We also have very important relationships with the Childrens Acute Transport team (CATS), with our Children’s ICS colleagues, and our sister network in the south of London – South Thames Paediatric Network.
Our work
The Network brings us all together to strengthen our engagement, share our good practice, collaborate across institutional boundaries and focus our energies on the best pathways of care for our patients. Coming out of COVID waves, our team worked very closely together with our hospitals to rebuild elective surgery with equitable waiting lists within ICBs, including with access to the private sector for some specialties. Network led projects such as Project Tooth Fairy have established new paediatric dental capacity for the sector and effectively delivered additional access to children requiring dental surgery under GA.
The shared vision is that members will work together regardless of organisation to develop cost-effective, new models of paediatric specialist care that are planned around children and young people not the service.
The Network supports patients, families, clinicians and organisations by providing access to specialist resources, education and expertise. It helps to design and deliver improvement programmes; co-ordinating patient pathways and providing objective data to support best practice and guidance.
Our network
The Network is formed of five key funded Operational Delivery Networks:
- Paediatric Critical Care (including High Dependency Care and Long-Term Ventilation
- Surgery in Children (including anaesthetics, oral health, ENT and orthopaedics)
- Paediatric Cancer
- Teenage and Young Adult Cancer
- Congenital Heart Disease (Cardiac)
Further key areas of activity include:
- Gastroenterology
- Neurology, Neurodisability, Stroke and Epilepsy
- Cross cutting themes e.g. Transition, Risk & Governance, Emergency Care Pathways, Education
There is an over-arching North Thames Paediatric Network Board. Each Operational Delivery Network and workstream has dedicated resource to support programme delivery: clinical leadership, project and data management, as well as administrative. Some resources are shared across the ODNs.The Network is hosted by Great Ormond St Hospital. It is accountable to NHSE Specialised Commissioning, via the regional Children and Young People’s Transformation Team.
