Integrated Neighbourhood Health in West Yorkshire
Across West Yorkshire, NHS organisations, West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA), councils and voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations are working better together so health and care is more local, more joined‑up and easier to use. This approach is called Integrated Neighbourhood Health (INH) and will be key to delivering the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan for England: Fit for the Future, which sets out the shift from hospital to community, from treatment to prevention, and from analogue to digital. It means that the health and care staff and volunteers that people rely on, such as GPs, social workers, mental health teams, pharmacists, and VCSE organisations, will have what they need to work as a single team around neighbourhoods, focusing on what matters to people who live there.
Integrated Neighbourhood Health is a concept that we have been working to for some time in West Yorkshire. This is not a new way of working, but builds on how our approach to how we have been working in partnership for almost a decade. Since the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership came into existence in 2016, we have had a long-standing commitment to our mission, values and behaviours, ensuring that neighbourhood health is at the heart of how we design and deliver care through preventative, person-centred ways of working, joined up in communities and delivered through integrated high quality, efficient services.
In West Yorkshire, we have five distinct geographical places; Bradford District and Craven, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield, where partner organisations have been working together to deliver our vision and reduce health inequalities in local communities. A specific focus on Integrated Neighbourhood Health is the most significant and recent opportunity for us to drive our ambitions further and faster, to deliver better for our people. This is about shaping, developing and delivering health and care services in a much more granular level.
Our vision in West Yorkshire is to create healthier, happier and fairer neighbourhoods, reducing the gap in life expectancy, creating a healthy life expectancy between neighbourhoods ranked most and least deprived in West Yorkshire. This essentially means that we will work to:
- Reduce the number of preventable, unplanned care activity and admission into settings, such as hospital
- Improve how we develop and focus on raising awareness of how the importance of prevention and working with local communities to live more healthily and
- Reduce the number of people in West Yorkshire who are economically inactive and not in employment due to ill health.
With the above in mind, in each of our five places, we will use what our local health and care data tells us, to:
- Focus on targeting the health and care needs of certain populations
- Allocate health and care resource to neighbourhoods based on need
- Ensure we use targeted approaches to improve health and care outcomes that are focussed on helping people to live healthier lives, and
- Take more personalised approaches to care supported by an understanding of how patients can take more control over their health and care.
As a health and care system, we remain committed to engaging with our local communities on a regular basis. Using insight and feedback from a wide range of organisations, we know what the majority of people want and need from local health and care services. Where we don’t, we will continue to engage with our local communities to make sure their voices are heard.
Integrated Neighbourhood Health will include a focus on setting up teams of health workers who will provide care closer to people's homes, in line with our recent work on establishing a West Yorkshire blueprint for how health and care services will be delivered in the future. Integrated Neighbourhood Health Teams (INHTs) will work to meet people’s physical, mental and social health needs, and reduce inequalities in access and outcomes that affect some of our communities.
In line with the intentions set out in Fit for the Future, and using feedback from tens of thousands of people who shared their views in the lead up to publication of the plan, we are now working with teams across West Yorkshire to:
- improve how we use data to better understand groups of people and the risks to their health
- improve access to general practice (family doctor practices) and continuity of care
- bring together physical and mental health services so that we can see and treat the whole person
- set up INHTs, people from a range of healthcare professions, so that we can coordinate care for people with complex needs
- take a “home first” approach to rehabilitation and reablement for people who have been in hospital or had a prolonged period of illness
- establish urgent neighbourhood services, expanding the use of urgent care services such as virtual wards.
INHTs are just one part of our work to reduce health inequalities and improve health outcomes and experiences across our local communities. Across our five places, we are working up tailored plans to include short, medium, and long-term action. Delivery will focus on priority groups, such as people with frailty, dementia, and those needing end-of-life care.
People working to create these new teams will be supported by:
- workforce transformation and organisational development projects
- improvements in how we use digital tools, data, and technology
- better use of our buildings and facilities to bring services together under one roof
- resource allocation and financial planning.
We will measure the success of our programmes by:
- reducing preventable unplanned care
- increasing early intervention
- improving patient and staff experience
- addressing health inequalities.