Hello everyone.
In West Yorkshire, we are committed to putting people at the heart of everything that we do. Some of the ways that this will manifest itself is through a strong emphasis on personalised care that puts people in control of their own care and support and through support for family carers that recognises and values their role within our system and ensuring we are supporting people at the right care, right time, and the right place.
It’s been a very busy few months as we move towards developing the long-term health and personalisation function that sits within the Partnership’s Clinical and Professional Directorate to achieve our ambitions for people.
The function will support the delivery of the long term conditions and personalisation programme with a focus on diabetes, stroke and end of life harnessing evidenced based personalised care interventions such as shared decision making, supported evidenced based self-management and social prescribing. Moving into this new directorate provides the opportunities to work closely with our clinical and professional networks in addressing the growing inequalities following the pandemic facing people in West Yorkshire.
The development of this new function will build on our programme’s work to date to ensure personalised care continues to be the golden thread of how we work across the wider partnership. This will sit alongside the unpaid carers’ agenda, which is all about ensuring no matter where carers live in West Yorkshire, they experience the same standard of care. It is also about ensuring everyone has an opportunity to discuss what matters to them in supporting their health and wellbeing and the people they care for.
As a partnership we recognise there are key building blocks, based on the house of care model for long term conditions that help inform our guiding principles including:
- Ensuring our processes, organisations and clinical pathways consistently embed personalised approaches that support better outcomes for people and their carers
- Drive a population health improvement approach across the partnership that meaningfully addresses health inequalities across West Yorkshire
- To enable our health and care workforce to be committed to partnership working and support the culture change required to embed personalised approaches for people with long term health conditions
- Support people and their carers to be better Informed and supported to manage their care and access support.
We are truly on a challenging and exciting journey as a new function in a new directorate. However our ethos remains the same, which is to continue to address widescale inequalities that exist across West Yorkshire, to improve the lives of the people who use our services, including carers, people living with long term conditions and diverse communities.
Young Carers Action Day
We were pleased to celebrate young carers action day held on 16 March; an annual event organised by Carers Trust to:
- Raise public awareness of young carers and young adult carers including the pressures and challenges they face and contribution they make.
- a day to call for action to provide more support for young carers and young adult carers
Young carers have been significantly impacted by the pandemic and a survey by Carers Trust published in March 2020 influenced the theme for the day, “Taking action on isolation” following engagement with young carers and young adult carers.
This year's West Yorkshire campaign “We’re here for you” using the hashtags #WYYoungCarers #YoungCarersActionDay, aimed to address the isolation experienced by young carers and young adult carers. Young Carers Action Day was a useful platform to raise awareness of young carers including the contribution they make and challenges they face juggling their caring responsibilities, education, and social life.
Fiona Rogers, our young carers coordinator, has been working to develop relationships through engagement with places including the Wakefield Young Carers Youth Forum. All the resources for Young Carers Action Day were coproduced with Wakefield Young Carers Youth Forum. The campaign generated significant interest from local places and included representation from five young carers services in each place as well as additional organisations on social media including: My Living Well, Education Partnerships, LCHNHST, Young Lives Consortium, Connexions, Thriving Kirklees, Carers Resource.
Young adult carers Tom and Sara were instrumental in the design of the resources using their lived experiences of being carers including input from Wakefield Young Carers Service 7–11-year-old young carers group too, providing a younger young carers view.
Tom said: ‘I'm really pleased with how much we've managed to do this year and knowing that I've helped other carers get the awareness and understanding that they deserve, I'm really happy with that’.
We took the opportunity to take over the @WeNurses twitter account for the day which has 107,000 followers. This enabled the message and the wider work of our unpaid carers programme, including the Young Carers Support App and ‘Lets Cook ebook’ to be showcased nationally to a large audience.
During coproduction, Tom suggested the main campaign message “We’re here for you” should be shared on billboards to young carers and children including young people who are not young carers. The programme managed to secure a billboard in Wakefield’s ‘The Ridings’ shopping centre for a week in Tom’s hometown of Wakefield. Young carers report often being forgotten or invisible and this demonstrated the commitment of the programme to young carers. The Billboard was launched on the day and drew significant interest on social media.
We had some excellent analytics from the day which included 1969 contributors, total tweets of 3340 and a total reach of 20,049,554. Links to the Young Carer Support App and ‘Lets Cook eBook’ were included alongside a QR to enable ease of access.
Rob Webster, CEO-Designate for the Partnership and Fatima produced films to support the “we’re here for you” message and campaign. The films were on the webpage and shared via Twitter on the day, which you can watch here.
Resources from the day including the flyers, films and vlog will be added to enable continued use to the planned education resource section on our young Carers web page. Our next steps is to build on the success of this campaign including upscaling these approaches across our five places and continuing to embed these within the programme.
Social prescribing day
A recent “People’s Voices Group” engagement report told us that people wanted more active promotion of community-based services, especially those facing higher health inequalities around ethnicity, neurodiversity, and age.
Social prescribing link workers take a holistic approach to people’s health and wellbeing for our communities by understanding and connecting them to “what matters to me and connecting them to local community-based groups. The 10 March marked the annual Social Prescribing Day celebrating the incredible work taking place at local place that has supported us to stay healthy during the pandemic and beyond. You can learn more about some of the local work taking place in West Yorkshire around green social prescribing on our website learn more about some of the local work taking place in West Yorkshire around green social prescribing on our website here.
Have a good weekend all.
Karen, Richard, and Fatima
As we celebrate the amazing talent and achievement of our Partnership colleagues who took part in the 
I am a proud West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership (HCP) 
I was recently successful in securing a promotion to a permanent role as the Associate Director for the Children and Young People and Families Programme for the Partnership. As a children’s nurse, I am truly humbled at the opportunity to influence on a larger scale for a better future for our young people and future generations. I am feeling immensely proud of the leadership journey I have been on which wouldn’t have happened had I not been encouraged to believe in the beauty of my dreams. 
Recovery and Wellbeing Colleges in Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield are joining forces to support the Yorkshire ‘Speak Their Name’ suicide memorial quilt project.Originally founded in 2020 in Greater Manchester, the project has been brought to Yorkshire by local parents, Karen Sykes and Anna Scott, and will see the creation of a quilt made of individual cotton squares, each designed by local people who have been bereaved to suicide.
Congratulations to Hebden Bridge Group Practice, the first West Yorkshire practice to make a referral to the NHS Low Calorie Diet (LCD) Programme being piloted in the area. On 24 March we held another packed one-hour training session to enable more healthcare professionals to make referrals to the innovative and free programme which combines specialist nutrition, behaviour change strategies and physical activity. Patients referred to the programme receive 12 weeks of low calorie diet (shakes and soups) followed by four weeks of gradual food reintroduction and eight months of weight maintenance, achieved through healthy eating, movement and behavioural change support.
This week, partners from all over West Yorkshire came together online for the VCSE Power showcase, a week-long event to celebrate the positive impact on health outcomes of the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise sector, working in partnership with health and social care organisations in West Yorkshire.
Hilary Thompson, Senior Responsible Officer for the Partnership’s Harnessing the Power of Communities programme, said: "We want to recognise the amazing work of our VCSE partners and the contribution they make day in day out to the lives of so many. Please browse, get in touch with the organisations directly and use these free resources to learn new ideas and share widely"