There’s no place like home

Mel PickupHi, my name is Mel.

It’s hoped that in July 2022 Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) like ours in West Yorkshire will be established as statutory bodies. I’m already proud of the achievements of our ICS and I believe passionately in the vision we all share for the people who live, learn, love, work and play here in our small part of the world. A future where there is better health and wellbeing for everyone. A future where all our people can enjoy longer, happier, and healthier lives.

Our West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership is made up of five individual places, Bradford District and Craven, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield, places that have some similarities, but also huge differences. Each celebrated and challenged in equal measure, steeped in proud histories whilst forging bright new futures, capitalising on their uniqueness, their specialness but all sharing a common truth. That those of us that live and work in all our places, are emerging from two years of a global pandemic ravaged and reeling, but ready and eager to rebuild.

I’ve titled this piece ‘There’s no place like home’ as I want to talk about my place, my home, Bradford District and Craven.

I feel immensely privileged to have been asked by my colleagues to take on the designate Place Based Lead role for our Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership. As I take on this role, we will continue to build on our Act as One ethos and use this to drive the changes we all want to see so we can deliver our own vision, of all of our people being ‘happy, healthy at home’.

I’m taking on the Place Based Lead role in addition to my role as CEO of Bradford Teaching Hospitals, something that is only possible, because of the strength of the relationships and partnerships that have been built across our place and our collective commitment to ‘distributed leadership’. What this means is that all heath and care leaders share some of the responsibility for leading and ensuring that our partnership delivers for our people. Acting as One and working as one.

Wharfe Valley Pathways logo and graphicI am proud to be a first among equals and to have brilliant colleagues, from all sectors making up our Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership leadership team, but we are only a small part of the story.

The real focus of our work is on our communities and neighbourhoods. We refer to this in our place based strategy as inverting the power to act, in other words, power belongs to the people and as much of it should be at individual, community and neighbourhood level as possible. The global pandemic showed us the positive and unique role that our communities play in our daily lives, the work they did during the height of our public health emergency really brought this into sharp focus.

We have seen how our community partnerships and primary care networks are working together, often alongside partners from the voluntary and community sector (VCS), to deliver change in true partnership with the people they serve. An example of this is the Wharfe Valley Pathways, a new community-based service that has been launched in the Keighley area to help people access physical and mental wellbeing support. Wharfe Valley Pathways brings together local voluntary and community organisations Keighley Healthy Living, The Cellar Trust and Project 6 who are working closely with community health services including GP practices.

Proactive Care Team – healthcare professionals, voluntary and community sectorThree years ago, a number of older people in the Bradford District and Craven area were being admitted to hospital unnecessarily due to frailty and falls. The Windhill, Idle and Saltaire Primary Care Network (PCN) saw a high prevalence of this within their population footprint. There was a determined drive to address this by setting up the PACT (Proactive Care Team), working with partners to provide holistic, person-centred care (and encourage self-care) for people with moderate frailty, to prevent it from becoming severe.

The delivery of this integrated approach has led to significant health and social improvements amongst this vulnerable cohort, as well as significant avoidance of injury and harm to the individuals receiving these services there are also associated cost savings.

If there was such a word as ‘Heartnership’, that would probably best describe one of the key characteristics and values that underpin how we operate. Making decisions with our hearts as well as our heads and seeking always to do the right thing.

It’s almost a year to the day that I wrote my last leadership blog and during that time Covid has continued to dominate our lives, we all now wait with bated breath to see if we really are seeing the green shoots of recovery. I want to take a moment to reflect on some amazing things that happened during, despite and in some cases, as a direct consequence of the unprecedented times we have just come through.

Thank You to all health and care staff and volunteers who have helped deliver the COVID-19 vaccination programmeIt’s immensely heartening for me to hear how world class research in our place is driving national and international efforts to combat Covid. We in Bradford District and Craven have been one of the leading players in researching new Covid vaccines including Novavax which has just been approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency.

Our own place based vaccination programme has celebrated achieving the 1 million vaccine mark, great news of course but we know that large numbers of the people who live in our communities have still not taken up the offer of a vaccine and we must work really hard to understand their reasons for that. We are undertaking innovative approaches to take the vaccine to our communities but also to have quality individual conversations face-to-face in a safe space. We will never judge people for their views, but we will always give them a warm welcome if they decide that taking the vaccine is now right for them.

We mustn’t lose sight too of the innovative approaches we have already taken to encourage people to come forward for their vaccine. We were the first place to run a women’s only clinics, the first to offer maternity clinics, the first to offer family clinics and the first to run one from a restaurant. Our Modality Primary Care Network managed to deliver over 50,000 vaccines from Emily Street Mosque, a remarkable achievement.

I was delighted to see how we came together as a partnership early in January to open the new Covid medicines delivery unit which is hosted at Airedale Hospital. This was only made possible thanks to the hard work of all colleagues involved, we are all really proud of you.

Covid at times felt all consuming and overwhelming, but even at the various peaks of the numbers of people suffering from Covid, in our hospitals, our care homes and in our communities we have still been able to continue development of our Act as One way of working. This past year has been a real year of achievement which is a testament to the hard work, dedication and commitment of all my colleagues.

Seeing our place-based partnership highlighted nationally is a reflection on what we have achieved together. It was great that we were able to welcome Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive for NHS England, to Bradford District and Craven twice last year so she could hear more about the work we’re doing.

The first visit gave her an opportunity to visit Airedale Hospital and Bradford Royal Infirmary to see how we have been working together on innovative solutions such as the BRI command centre. Her second visit offered her the chance to find out more about our ground-breaking work we are doing to improve mental health and wellbeing, including our mental health support teams that are helping school pupils hosted by Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust, as well as our inspiring work on Reducing Inequalities in Communities (RiC).

Our successes simply would not be possible without all our partners working together. We are keen to showcase our work involving our local authority partners as well as the voluntary and community sector. This includes speaking at the Health Service Journal’s Integrated Care Summit and we have also been featured in the Local Government Association’s Must Know guide on integrated health and care.

But the greatest showcase for our work that really did involve the broadest range of our partners was the Act as One Festival – back again later this year so keep an eye out for updates. The festival was a real success that included wellbeing sessions, national speakers, local colleagues sharing best practice including our remarkable voluntary and community sector and climaxing with our recognition day where we were joined by Prerana Issar, Chief People Officer for the NHS and Chris Hopson, Chief Executive for NHS Providers. Our recognition day brochure is available from the One Workforce Hub website, well worth a read as it is jam packed with case studies from across our place.

I mentioned that we are a ‘heartnership’ as much as we are a partnership. We do not under estimate the job of work we have to do in Bradford District and Craven to ensure we also win the hearts and minds of those in our communities, particularly those who constantly feel they have been left behind, who feel and experience discrimination and injustice, who are lonely, isolated or excluded , suffer hurt or abuse at the hands of others and we are very much aware that our vaccination programme insight work has shown us that for many, a huge trust gap exists between public sector agencies and the communities we serve. We are committed to addressing this and can only do so by truly connecting with our people in the places where they live, listening to and acting on what they tell us, working with them and for them. They say don’t they that home is where the heart is, we believe everyone deserves a home that they can be healthy and happy in, because ultimately what matters the most is that  We all have somewhere to live, someone to love something to do AND something to hope for.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend

Mel