The way we work
In order to help deliver our programme’s strategy, the four mental health/learning disability trusts in the partnership area have formed a Collaborative which is beginning to help drive forward the system changes that need to be made, remove barriers to integration and ultimately ensure that our resident population receive the best care and support that can be offered within finite resources.
This may mean that some providers will no longer provide specific services that they historically provided and that these will be commissioned once through a provider lead which will ensure that equity of access, service modernisation and integration happens across the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership. Through the Collaborative, providers will share and learn from their experiences, including what has not gone well, offer peer support and challenge. Boundaries between services, organisations and across the provider/commissioner landscape will begin to blur focusing on becoming “one workforce” with a collective ambition. Where local place based governance arrangements are emerging that move beyond the historic transactional commissioner/provider arrangement we will share learning and potential benefits/challenges across the ICS partnership.
Mental health care is often disconnected from the wider health and care system, and as a result, people do not always receive coordinated support for their physical health, mental health and wider social needs. The programme will strive to correct this and assure that, in partnership with our 6 places and within the workstreams. Standardising practice can aid with this integration; for example by working to common policies and procedures and having the same anticipated outcomes. We must also ensure that the learning and innovation in each of our 6 places, who have their own local ambition to create prevention-focused integrated services, is shared across the system and identify where it makes sense to either:
- Collaborate to ensure we reduce variation
- Utilise and develop professional and clinical leadership to help drive transformation and its adoption
- Standardise an approach where there is evidence base that it works well and where it supports a better interface with a region wide service eg police, ambulance
- Commission once to standardise the offer, integrates better, and reduces duplication
- Integrate services, including an “one workforce” ambition,to build resilience and reduce “hand offs”
- Reconfigure services to ensure viability and drive up quality of provision
- Integrate with other programmes of work to ensure physical/mental health integration
- Invest time in consideration about the way in which we work and our culture of collaboration
- Bring commissioning and provider functions closer together to transform services (initially using commissioner lead and provider lead models but developing and blurring boundaries between the functions in the future).