Hello, my name is Esther.
Next month our Partnership Board will be signing off our refreshed five-year strategy for the partnership, which will set out our vision and ambition for the people of West Yorkshire over the next five years. The new 2022 Health and Care Act states that all Integrated Care Partnerships (what we know as our Partnership Board in West Yorkshire) should develop a five year integrated care strategy to set out their ambitions. Given we only published our last plan, ‘Better Health and Wellbeing for Everyone’, in February 2020, it was important that we used this as a foundation for our new strategy. This was even more important given that alongside new statutory arrangements, Covid, increasing challenges in health and care and the cost-of-living crisis have compounded health inequalities for the people of West Yorkshire, so many of our ambitions from this plan are as important today as they were in 2020.
This strategy is owned by our Partnership Board and reflects the ambition of our whole West Yorkshire system. It is a strategy to improve health inequalities which brings together all partners across West Yorkshire and is built from local joint health and wellbeing strategies. You can read more about integrated care strategies here. In designing the process to develop our strategy, we knew this would be a valuable opportunity to use the work, to help us create a system which will ensure that we deliver our ambitions. To do this we wanted to take an organisational development approach, building systems leadership across our partnership. Connecting more of our system to itself. This started with involving people from across our partnership, creating a movement where we could reach out to as many parts of our system as possible. With a group of 20 people initially in a strategy design group, we co-designed the process to refresh our strategy, developing the right questions to ask in our engagement, the right ways to ask and to listen and the right tools in which we could get the most honest views. Through this approach, we managed to reach out to over 60 formal groups / committees/ boards across West Yorkshire but also many informal groups and individual conversations.
We also worked closely with Healthwatch to gather valuable insight on what the people of West Yorkshire have been telling us is important to them over the last year. In addition, the insight which has come out of conversations with people across our places through ICB led place discussions and through our local authorities and provider organisations. This is where our involvement framework is so important in our ongoing planning and evaluation and why we are working through our strategy to build more experience of care into our work.
The work, however, did not stop there. It was important to the strategy design group that whilst our strategy would set out our ambitions and vision for the future, it also needed to be a living strategy, one which was poverty, climate and trauma informed. To do this, we needed to keep pushing to work towards a system which continually listens, learns and improves. This needed our group to grow, to become a movement embracing new ways of thinking and learning how to work together in an open and honest way where we can share promising practice and work through challenges collectively.
With over 80 people now part of our wider group this has given us the opportunity to spread our approach to this work through even more of our Partnership. This is so important as we move into developing our plans to deliver the strategy through our Joint Forward Plan, which is a requirement of ICBs to develop to illustrate how they will deliver the NHS elements of the strategy. Ensuring that as we develop those plans, we acknowledge the need to get our basics right and invest in doing that now, but to also look to the future. We want to see and think about what needs to change now, to ensure that we can achieve it. This involves some tough choices around how we prioritise and phase work, particularly when considering constraints around finance and capacity. Following the publication of our strategy and Joint Forward Plan, we will also work to make sure that we have organised ourselves through our programmes in the right way to deliver our strategy.
The last bit of this work is how we embed this way of working into our ongoing work and how we keep learning as a system. The West Yorkshire Organisational Development Network is a key part of supporting this. We are working with a small group from the strategy design group to develop an ongoing series of quarterly improvement workshops. These workshops will provide an opportunity to test out some of the tools we have learnt through this process, to facilitate sharing of best practice across places, programmes, providers and sectors and to work together to find solutions to help us get to the future we want to see. If you would like to be involved in the ongoing strategy work, please do just get in touch. We are always looking for more people to join our exciting movement!
Mohammed Bilal – Senior Strategy Manager, West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board
Hello everyone, I am Mohammed Bilal, and I am a Senior Strategy Manager working in the West Yorkshire ICB Strategy Team to deliver the Five-Year Strategy refresh and Joint Forward Plan.
I started my role in the Strategy Team in July of last year. The role is a 12-month placement as part of the Fellowship I am on. The Fellowship was set up by the West Yorkshire Race Equality Network with support from the Partnership for colleagues from ethnic minorities aspiring to move into senior leadership roles. This was one of the actions to achieve ambition 8 of the Partnership’s 10 big ambitions, which is to increase the diversity of senior leaders across the Partnership.
Prior to this role I had little system level experience, and the Fellowship has given me the opportunity to work with a wide range of colleagues, partners and stakeholders at system level. Like many colleagues from ethnic minorities, I have a great deal of knowledge, skill and experience to offer but limited opportunity to show my potential.
I chose to take up this placement within Strategy because I felt it was important to try something new, something that would take me out of my comfort zone and therefore help me gain wider skills and experience and grow as a leader.
I am working in a team of amazing people they are, Esther Ashman and Shane Hayward-Giles and we are also at the moment working alongside Myron Rogers who is providing us with some additional systems thinking expertise. Each team member has a different set of skills and brings different experiences which has helped us develop a team dynamic that has made me feel valued and safe enough to share and test my opinions. The team have supported me throughout my journey, giving me opportunities to learn, develop and utilise new skills – giving me real confidence in working in this new area.
Stepping into the role has come with a steep learning curve. However, I am a firm believer in maximising any opportunities that I find or are presented with, and that is the mindset I took coming into this role. Working in this role and being part of the ICB has made me think about the bigger picture, the wider system and the many determinants that play a part in the health and wellbeing of citizens across West Yorkshire. It has also taught me about working with ambiguity, uncertainty and how to influence. Probably the most important lesson I have learnt in this role is that system working heavily relies on trust and relationships and this has been clear to see in the interactions I have facilitated, observed and experienced during this role.
Reflecting on the last six months I am grateful to the Partnership and the West Yorkshire Race Equality Network for setting up the Fellowship and giving me this invaluable opportunity. I am proud to be involved in the preparation of the Strategy refresh and the Joint Forward Plan and contributing meaningfully to the lives and health of our citizens and communities across West Yorkshire.
Rachel Millson - Senior Strategic Planning and Development Manager, Kirklees Health and Care Partnership
Having the opportunity to be involved in the West Yorkshire Strategy Design Group has been a great experience so far. Working in the NHS during the past two years has been fast paced, pressured and reactive. Being part of the strategy design process has given me the time to think both creatively and strategically and I have found this invaluable. The design sessions have been structured in a way which enables open and honest conversation, encourages building of relationships and networking and pushes you (outside of your comfort zone at times) to think differently. I am perhaps one of the more junior members of the group and I have always felt comfortable in contributing to discussion and sharing my views. I think having the opportunity to meet face to face has been one of the real successes of the process. It has allowed me to interact with people from different organisations who all bring a different perspective and to the conversation, and really broadened my understanding on health, care and also the things that have an impact of health and wellbeing.
Having the opportunity to work with Myron has provided me with a different way of thinking about the system we work within and how it needs to change to be more sustainable in the future. We have learnt tools along the way which have made me re-consider how I approach conversations and how I encourage / enact change. Personally I feel my skills as a leader have developed through being part of the group alongside my confidence in my abilities as a leader.
Within Kirklees Place we are fortunate that the timescales for the refresh of the Health and Wellbeing Strategy and in the on-going development of the Health and Care Plan (a delivery vehicle for the Health and Wellbeing Strategy) have aligned with those of the Integrated Care Strategy and Joint Forward Plan. This has given me the opportunity to put some of the learning from the Design Group into practice. To develop the Health and Care Plan, I have adopted a design group approach with membership partners within health and care, and whilst this group is leading on the development of the plan, our approach is to involve as many people as possible in the process through different groups and forums to build momentum behind it. Although we are in the early stages, the response locally has been really positive so far and I am confident we will develop a more system focussed plan which people feel they can really get behind and understand how they contribute to delivery.
The Partnership would like to extand a big thank you to colleagues in Kirklees, including Local Care Direct, Curo Health staff, Locala Community Partnerships, Kirklees Council, Kirklees Health and Care Partnership and Dr James Thomas, Medical Director for NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board for being part of BBC Look North news on Thursday – explaining about care in the community at home.
The Kirklees Tackling Poverty Partnership brings together partners across the district to both prevent and mitigate the impact of poverty. This will support Kirklees to be a district that has both a strong, sustainable and inclusive economy and where residents enjoy better health throughout their lives. It will contribute towards thriving communities, increased prosperity and reduced inequalities.
After 12 February, booster doses will no longer be offered. Future booster vaccines may be offered to those at higher risk.
The Trust continue to pledge their support to 
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Ex-professional sportsmen have helped hundreds of employees across West Yorkshire talk about mental health and suicide through awareness-raising sessions funded by the Partnership's Suicide Prevention Programme.
PenCycle
The Clinical Forum met virtually on Tuesday. The meeting was chaired by Dr James Thomas. Forum members include medical directors, GPs, pharmacists, allied health professionals, lead nurses and NHS England colleagues. Forum members discussed system pressures, and that colleagues are working exceptionally hard.
We have published a 
Momentum for our campaign