As many of you will know, the Department of Health recently released new local performance metrics for health and social care integration. These are meant to provide a set of measures about how health and social care partners in every local authority area in England are performing, both against their statistical nearest neighbours and nationally. Encouragingly, Rutland came out on top against these measures when they were published for the first time.

Now, I know what you are thinking: ‘A place like Rutland only came out on top because it’s a small, affluent, rural county in the East Midlands’. Am I right? The truth is we have come a very long way to get to this point.