Hello.
Most people in the country are enjoying the easing of restrictions as we make great progress in rolling out the Covid vaccine, but the impact of the last 15 months on mental health is becoming increasingly clear. As we are all addressing the backlog of demand, we are also seeing increased demand and, in this blog, there are two important population groups we wanted to focus on – Children and Young people and our health and care workforce.
Up and down the country it is recognised that the COVID pandemic has been a difficult experience for children and young people, who have had to cope with disruption to their education and their interaction with friends and family. Nationally the pressure on Children & Young People’s Mental Health Services, and inpatient beds is significant – and this is no different within our partnership.
Our Mental Health, Learning Disabilities and Autism Programme and Children, Young People and Families Programme are working closely to reduce the incidence of trauma in children’s lives, meeting our ambition to be fully trauma informed by 2030, by tailoring our services so they understand and can respond to the impact of these traumatic events.
NHS-led Provider Collaboratives (also described as Lead Provider Collaboratives or LPCs) are new ways of organising specialised mental health, learning disability and autism services; meaning that in West Yorkshire we will hold both the budget and provider responsibility for these services. allowing us to future-proof our ability to deliver specialised care and treatment. To begin with, Provider Collaboratives will deliver Children and Young People Mental Health inpatient services, Adult Low and Medium Secure Services and Adult Eating Disorder Services. We will shortly be going live as a lead provider for oung People Mental Health inpatient services.
You can watch an animation about Lead Provider Collaboratives
Read more about what we’re doing in West Yorkshire and Harrogate
The ambition for Lead Provider Collaboratives is to ensure that people (including children and young people) with specialised mental health, learning disability and autism needs experience high quality care, as close to home as appropriately possible – care that is connected with local teams and support networks, prevents people being in hospital if they don’t need to be, and enables people to leave hospital when they are ready. Lead Provider Collaboratives will also bring much-needed focus on tackling inequalities for local populations and increasing the voice of lived experience in improving the quality of care provided.
Backed by NHS England funding we are also growing the number of Mental Health Support Teams who work with schools, meaning that each of our places will have established teams by January 2022, growing to coverage of 50% of our young population by January 2024 (above the national expectations of 35%). By investing in these services, alongside wider investment into community support for oung People Mental Health inpatient services; particularly Eating Disorders, and taking every opportunity to secure NHS England funding for diagnosis and pathway support for Autism we hope to prevent the need for increased escalation of our young people into more specialised services.
Later this year we will open Red Kite View, our new state of the art oung People Mental Health inpatient services facility for West Yorkshire, offering additional capacity and an improved therapeutic and social environment. We are also piloting Night OWLS – a bespoke, overnight service for children and families run by Leeds Survivor Led Crisis Service. This service will provide tailored support, advice, and signposting to local services with the aim of reducing the number of young people who need to access formal crisis services.
We can’t deliver any of this important work without our people which is the second group I wanted to highlight. We all know how hard our colleagues have worked, the sacrifices they have made and sadly some have lost their lives. In my own Trust we have lost colleagues to Covid and the impact of that still feels very raw. We know the mental health of our people is impacted by the jobs they do, and this has been exacerbated by the pandemic. As there is this sense of moving out of the pandemic the impact on our staff will become ever more present. Our view is this is not something we should respond to as business as usual, there needs to be dedicated and high-quality support for our people – they deserve nothing less. That underpins the approach we have taken to developing our Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub for all 100 000 staff working in our organisations. We secured dedicated funding for the Hub of £600,000 last financial year and additional funding of £1.7m has been confirmed for the financial year 2021-22. We have also secured a further £640 000 to develop and pilot a range of enhanced occupational health and wellbeing initiatives.
Our Hub is live and active now, and we urge anyone who is struggling in any way from the impacts of the pandemic to access help now. We know that care-givers are among the last people to seek support for the effects of trauma, burnout, stress, depression and anxiety and want to emphasise that this service is exclusively for you. More resources are available via our staff suicide prevention campaign Check-In. Please don’t hesitate, our trained therapists are ready to help you now.
As I finish this week’s blog the question, I ask myself is – will all this be enough – for our young people and for our people. Well - only time will tell and of course we will be monitoring and evaluating every step of the way. I remind myself and I remind all others that since March 2020 we have had to adapt, respond and change, operating with an unprecedented degree of uncertainty and unpredictability but never failing in our focus on doing right by our citizens. We need to maintain that focus for the mental health of our young citizens of west Yorkshire who I hope will be inspired to join our workforce in future years; and for our people now - who we owe a huge amount and at the very least need to ensure they don’t suffer any more harm for the sacrifices they have made for us all.
Have a good weekend all,
Sara and Keir
Anyone aged 18 or over in West Yorkshire will have the opportunity to get their Covid-19 vaccination this weekend by simply walking into one of a number of pop-up vaccination clinics.
Alison Lowe has been confirmed as the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime (DMPC) in West Yorkshire. Alison was nominated for the role by Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire and on Friday received the unanimous approval of the West Yorkshire Police and Crime Panel. As Chief Executive at Touchstone, a mental health and wellbeing charity based in West and South Yorkshire, she specialised in working with diverse communities. Alison is also a non-executive director at Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust
The Harnessing the Power of Communities programme has been continuing to work with colleagues in the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and the Humber Coast and Vale Health and Care Partnership on the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector ‘Economic and Social Value Research’. We have two focus groups set up in July to test early findings with voluntary community and social enterprise colleagues, and a final report will be published at the end of July.
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust has submitted plans to Kirklees Council requesting planning permission to build a new Accident and Emergency (A&E) building at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.
The past year has been incredibly challenging. However, we have seen some phenomenal examples of innovative solutions to help improve patient care.
In a piece for 
The NHS will mark its 73rd birthday on Monday July 5 after a year like no other. The birthday offers us all a chance to say a big thank you, and to remember those we have lost.