Posted on: 17 September 2021
Hello, my name is Richard.
It is 18 months since I contracted COVID for the first time in early March 2020…..whilst I can’t be sure that I had COVID as LFTs and PCRs were not yet part of day-to-day language, it did feel very similar to when I had it (courtesy of my 11 year old) for a second time. Second time round, having described the theory of the Test and Trace system many times to people, it was fascinating to experience it in practice first hand. The “detached observer” bit of me wanted to get out a roll of paper and some post its and process map it! What we also experienced was the power of informal support from friends, neighbours and the local support group that we had been volunteers at.
When I have had the time/thinking space to step back over the last 18 months and observe, I have been fascinated by the combination of planning and pragmatism that I have seen in the system. There are things that we would have spent a long time planning, turning into specifications and worrying about that, instead, we just got on and did. Relationships have flourished at a local community level…..I had always been optimistic about how PCNs and the broader community capacity would come together to start to develop different solutions to the health and wellbeing of local communities and that has happened in spades. There has, I would suggest, been a more proportionate approach to “governance” and an understanding of measured risks necessary to achieve a better outcome.
As we all tried to get to grips with PPE (or rather the sporadic supply of it) we had council colleagues who normally service gas boilers and manage building materials instead setting up PPE warehouses and delivering stock across the local system, library colleagues who stopped checking out books and started running testing centres, making welfare calls and delivering support to the clinically vulnerable and a community support worker who spent the weekend cleaning a care home because that was what needing doing. Many many people across the whole health and care system stepped outside the constraints of their job description or the organisation that was on their lanyard and worked for people and for place.
In the summer of last year in Kirklees, we developed “Community Protection Plans” which were about practical, on the ground activity, in areas where infection rates were highest to understand what was driving these higher rates and how and who might best help to address this. The answers sometimes lay in the health and care system, but more often lay outside the system, relying on a range of community leaders and broader community/universal services to take a leadership role on behalf of the health and care system.
Fast forwarding 6 months and the conversation was about mobilising the community vaccination programme. I would suggest that we have come to understand that the large scale system approaches to inviting people for their vaccination have worked well for many people but that these approaches left other people behind….very often the same people who experience greatest health inequalities and have, historically, had less good and timely access to the health and care system. In response, we have seen real creativity and thought go into understanding who, at a local level, can best encourage take up and where best to run a vaccination clinic in a way that really is accessible.
Delivering a community vaccination programme has hugely accelerated that sense of an integrated team delivering for a local community and broadened an understanding of who, in a local neighbourhood, needs to be part of that “team”.
The level of operational pressure at the moment means that it will be easy to put to one side what we have learned over the last 18 months. As we grapple with the processes needed to establish a new formal operating model for the West Yorkshire Health and Care system, we could forget about how we felt comfortable bending process if that delivered better outcomes for people and communities.
My big hope is that we really do embed the learning and broaden its application…..if we found a model that helped local communities address high infection rates in their local area, can we replicate that approach to addressing diabetes or other long term conditions where that localised community leadership is far more effective than a bland set of messages? If we developed a model that ensured that people with a learning disability, or who are living with autism or whose first language is not English received the vaccination in a way that worked for them, can we not do that for their outpatient appointment? We need processes that work for most people but we also need to keep doing as we have done and recognise when these processes exclude people and find a creative alternative instead. We will need to continue to do as we have done and harness a wider group of allies to assist us by creating a joint endeavour with our local communities. This is absolutely in the spirit of how we have worked as a local and West Yorkshire system in the last few years, so let’s just step it up a gear.
I’d like to finish though with a question….. “would it be reasonable to stop my 11 year old daughter’s pocket money for the rest of the year as a response to giving me COVID?” and a share….some photos of some great colleagues doing their bit for local communities. A huge thanks to them and to everyone else who has been part of Team Kirklees and Team West Yorkshire.
Thanks for reading. I hope you have a nice weekend.
Richard
What else has been happening this week?
Public and patient involvement
Last week over 90 people who work in public involvement, including patient experience came together to hear more about the new health and care bill for integrated care systems which is currently passing through Parliament. Ensuring public involvement is at the centre of all we do is a priority for us. The work builds on the public involvement review we did earlier this year.
Accessing primary care resources
In response to ongoing patient need and public perceptions about the ways in which primary care continues to operate we have produced an infographic to help explain more about this. Why are GP Practices still working differently? The infographic can be accessed on the Partnership website.
We are working to produce this in audio, animation and BSL formats. Please share this locally and use where appropriate. This will continue to be shared on Twitter @WYHpartnership. For more information please email Vicky.
World Patient Safety Day, 17 September
For World Patient Safety Day, 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) urges all stakeholders to ‘act now for safe and respectful childbirth’ with the theme ‘safe maternal and newborn care’. To follow this online the official hashtags are #WorldPatientSafetyDay #PatientSafety and #fmlnetwork
In March 2019 NHS England published Saving Babies Lives version 2 (SBLv2), this included information for providers and commissioners of maternity care on how to reduce perinatal mortality across England. One element of this recommends the appointment of a fetal monitoring lead with the responsibility of improving the standard of fetal monitoring.
The aim of the fetal monitoring lead is to support staff working on the labour ward to provide high quality intrapartum risk assessments and accurate CTG interpretation and should contribute to building and sustaining a safety culture on the labour ward with all staff committed to continuous improvement.
The importance of fetal monitoring was highlighted again in the Ockenden Report published December 2020. The report recommends as an essential action that all maternity services must appoint a dedicated lead midwife and lead obstetrician both with demonstrated expertise to focus on and champion best practice in fetal monitoring. Each Trust within the West Yorkshire and Harrogate LMS has a dedicated fetal monitoring lead who meet regularly as a group to share ideas and best practice to meet the objectives of their role
One of the ways the group recently promoted fetal monitoring and wellbeing was through the ‘Monitoring May’ events. Catherine Hopley, fetal monitoring lead from the Mid Yorkshire Hospitals Trust shares her reflections on the events;
“Monitoring May, like many plans, was a sunflower grown out of a mustard seed of an idea. The original intention was to place fetal monitoring under the microscope within our own Trust for a period of a month, prior to implementing new Guidance with the introduction of a more physiological based approach whilst continuing to use the embedded NICE classification of the CTG. As echoed in the reports by ‘Each Baby Counts’ (2020), escalation, although a key theme, could not be addressed in isolation. We needed to address recognition, communication, and action of concerns raised. With thanks to both the national and regional fetal monitoring networks, and social media, this was able to grow into a national online event for obstetricians and midwives across the country. We had huge support from the East Midlands Academic Health Sciences Network thanks to the enthusiasm of the team responsible for Intelligent Intermittent Auscultation. The AHSN generously gave their time, professionalism and experience, to enable us to turn the dream into a reality by creating a platform for Monitoring May which also allowed recordings to be captured”. The recordings are now available to watch on YouTube.
Thank you to everyone involved in arranging the Monitoring May events as well as those who gave their time to present at the sessions.
West Yorkshire Children and Young People’s Mental Health Service
Red Kite View: ‘Not just a building’
“Work is well on track for the projected November handover of Red Kite View, the new home and physical embodiment of our Children and Young People’s Mental Health Service” writes Nik Lee, Operational Manager at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. Read Nik's blog.
Latest issue of the West Yorkshire Children and Young People’s Mental Health Service newsletter, August/September 2021
All the latest developments in our new service for young people, and the exciting progress on the wonderful inpatient home for the service, Red Kite View. West Yorkshire Children and Young People’s Mental Health Service (formerly known as CAMHS and now CYPMHS) is developing a new approach to working seamlessly with the community for the benefit of our young service users.
Leeds and Bradford part of new data sharing project to better support vulnerable families
Leeds City Council and Bradford Council have together secured almost £1 million of funding to help ensure children and families receive the right help at the right time.
The two West Yorkshire cities have been awarded £991,816 of the Government’s Data Accelerator Fund which will be used to improve how data is shared between local partners such as councils, NHS trusts and the police.
By sharing information across schools, health, housing, police and social care, frontline workers can get a better understanding of an individual family’s needs and the often interconnected challenges they face, such as mental health issues, employment, and substance misuse.
Local authorities can use this information to ensure children and families receive the right help at the right time, with tailored, wraparound support being put in place as early as possible.
The government’s data accelerator fund is £7.9 million in total and will also support 9 other data sharing projects across England. Funding for the data projects will run up until 2023 and be divided over two years.
‘Looking out for each other’
Phase 4 of our award-winning community campaign ‘Looking out for our neighbours’ has been renamed ‘Looking out for each other’ and launched on 13 September. This campaign has been co-created to encourage young people aged 15-24 years to #SpreadTheKindness with their friends and peers during what is often a time of change for many at the start of a new academic year. Read more about the ‘Looking out for each other’ campaign launch on the Partnership website.
Social media videos will be created by our campaign ambassadors around the theme of #SpreadTheKindness over a six-week period. We’ll be bringing the campaign to life in lots of visual ways and sharing these on the Our Neighbours website and in weekly updates to partners and campaign supporters.
We’re encouraging organisations from all corners of the community working alongside young people to sign up to be a supporter sign up to be a supporter. We’ll share with you a supporters toolkit and discuss ideas with you to involve and inspire young people to get involved. For more information contact: Vicky.
Partnership wins award for Check-In staff suicide campaign
Thank you and congratulations to the literally hundreds of people and organisations across west Yorkshire and Harrogate for working together to help reduce staff suicide through our Check-In campaign. On Thursday (16 September), the campaign was recognised at the 2021 NHS Communicate Awards, winning in the 'Internal Communications and Staff Engagement' category. The Partnership was also nominated for Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Communications.
Pacer train becomes family support centre for Airedale Hospital
Last week, Airedale hospital took delivery of a Pacer train, which they won in a Department for Transport competition in 2020. The train, once fitted out appropriately, will be used as a non-clinical space for young inpatients on their children’s ward to get away from the ward and for children and young people visiting paediatric outpatients, to help them have a more positive experience. Read more about the arrival of the train on the Airedale Hospital NHS Trust website.