Matt Greensmith

Matt Greensmith

March 2022

I wanted to work in the West Yorkshire partnership to learn about the potential for placing public health priorities at the heart of decision making in integrated care systems (ICS) at a time when the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership is preparing to become a statutory body replacing many of the functions undertaken by clinical commissioning groups. I also wanted to work with the partnership because of its strong reputation for addressing inequalities.

System perspective

One of the key benefits of working in the partnership is the opportunity for gaining a system perspective on large issues that affect the outcome and experiences of populations. This goes beyond healthcare and I have benefitted in working with people in community organisations, local authorities, charities, service users as well as colleagues in hospitals and primary care networks and NHS England. The system perspective enables you to see the big picture and how challenges and solutions in one part of the system will impact and affect others. An example of this is the work on elective recovery I have been involved with, supporting hospital services to address waiting lists whilst also striving to reduce inequalities in access to care. To focus on this the partnership funded pilot programmes, delivered by community services for people with specific needs such as muscular-skeletal conditions to help them improve their well-being whilst waiting for care.

Focus on inequalities

Addressing inequalities has been central to the work I have been involved with within the partnership and as well as working on national programmes within the region I have also been encouraged to lead on work where I have identified opportunities for system improvement. I have been encouraged to work across programmes and contribute and provide leadership to diverse pieces of work including developing educational resources for secondary care clinicians, housing, primary care services and supporting the development of the health equity fellowship programme.

I have been supported to work with colleagues in the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector to develop a standard approach to evaluating the reach of our grant funded programmes, ensuring we target the communities with our resources that have the greatest capacity to benefit by using the indices of multiple deprivation.

Within the Improving Population Health Programme I have had the opportunity to work as part of what feels like a public health multi-disciplinary team with other registrars, colleagues working on national diabetes prevention programmes, climate  experts and violence reduction leads. The breadth of skills knowledge and experience has been a great learning experience as has been the access and opportunities to work with senior clinical leaders.