Posted on: 3 January 2023
Dear colleagues,
We are writing to say a huge thank you to all primary care colleagues across West Yorkshire for your collective response to the pressures facing every element of our health and care system. The extra measures taken in primary care in recent weeks and over the last few days have alleviated pressure on the whole health and care system. Thank you.
You have helped support people who can be cared for at home and have enabled our local hospitals to discharge people sooner to clear corridors and keep the system flowing for those most in need of life-threatening care. Your responsiveness has also meant fewer people with less serious conditions have defaulted to A&E at a time when very long waits have been apparent.
We are also very grateful to primary care colleagues who have offered their time to support out of hours services, which have experienced exceptionally high levels of demand resulting in long delays for clinical call back over the New Year period. Without your help and support, things would have been significantly worse.
We appreciate all of this has placed additional pressure on your teams at a time when you continue to be extremely busy. We also know that this pressure is likely to continue in the days ahead as we deal with the ongoing consequences of respiratory illnesses and the usual disruption that follows a Bank Holiday.
Our priority as a system remains to provide safe care in the most appropriate setting and to prioritise the sickest patients. As we emerge from the Bank Holiday period, we will work through our places and with our hospitals to ensure that this is the case.
Everyone remains exceptionally busy, including general practices, community services and within our hospitals. It has been clear over the last few days in the regular incident management calls that have occurred each day, that this is an exceptional period that has been managed because of our collective efforts.
Within secondary care, whilst attendances at A&E have reduced slightly, the number of seriously ill patients needing admission is high. All hospitals have significant additional beds open, including super surge beds in corridors or other spaces that may be utilised in extreme cases, which means that people who need to be admitted are experiencing delays due to bed availability. People attending A&E with less serious conditions continue to face very long waits to be seen. We are reminding people to seek help from the right service to meet their needs, starting with NHS 111 online.
We recognise that primary care and general practice is the place that delivers the most support for our patients in the community and that the asks of you have increased the time it takes for you to facilitate secondary care support when it is clinically necessary.
Experience tells us all that the first couple of weeks in January are always challenging. We are also preparing for further industrial action on January 11. We will therefore keep you regularly updated about the pressures across the whole system so that you have the most up to date information available when you need it to help best manage your patients’ needs.
To help with this we would encourage all practices to please continue reporting your own OPEL status through your local SitRep processes so that we can better respond to pressures in primary care alongside those in secondary and community care. We know that you will continue to maximise capacity in primary care for urgent and same day appointments for the foreseeable future and to make use of services that can support people at home where possible. We will update you further on what this means locally in terms of meeting other patients needs as soon as we know more.
It is important that we understand the pressures general practice is facing and our process for doing this is through the local SitRep system. It is through this process that we can regularly review and feedback pressures in general practice, enabling West Yorkshire to not only feedback to national colleagues whilst also reviewing the impact and adjusting support programmes that are already in place.
Finally, we have been liaising with NHS England on what arrangements we can put in place to ensure that practices do not lose out if planned commitments are impacted by the changes. We are keen to ensure that you do not lose out from your significant work with local people and families during this period and hope to be able to provide clarity on this as soon as possible.
Thank you once again for your continued support and hard work during this difficult time.
Very best wishes,
Rob Webster CBE, CEO for NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board and CEO Lead for West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership
Dr James Thomas, Medical Director for NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board
Dr Richard Vautrey, NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board, Provider Primary Medical Services Partner Member