Health and wellbeing boards have been seen by local government as having huge potential to bring much needed coherence to a fragmented system. Establishing robust and effective partnership boards will be challenging, but councils and their partners have been taking on the challenge of setting up boards in anticipation of forthcoming legislation.

Across the country, local authorities are taking a variety of approaches in setting up health and wellbeing boards. Among the issues they are tackling are the remit and appropriate membership of boards, the extent to which they will be involved in commissioning, what the focus of their activities will be, how they will carry out performance management and how they will engage with stakeholders, including service users and patients.