About the urgent and emergency care programme
The West Yorkshire urgent and emergency care system (UEC) includes hospitals, primary care, mental health, social care, urgent care, dentistry, community pharmacy and voluntary organisations. Our aim is to further develop our health and care system, so it delivers a highly responsive service for people. This involves working with other West Yorkshire priority programmes such as mental health, primary care and improving population health who share common themes. It means ensuring that people’s needs are met in the right place, at the right time, with the right support.
Ensuring our approach is collaborative and remains focused on place is important to both transformation and operational work. As a Partnership, with Harrogate remaining as a strategic partner we are working at a West Yorkshire region level that includes Bradford & Craven, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield. In doing so we remain focused on the primacy of our places (work continues to be led at place) and local population need and local variances in the urgent care offer means we work collectively when it is the right thing to do for local people.
The key partners and attendees at our monthly programme board meetings include:
- The West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT) are part of the Health and Care Partnership. WYAAT is an innovative collaboration which brings together the NHS trusts who deliver acute hospital services across West Yorkshire and Harrogate. It is about local hospitals working in partnership with one another to give patients access to the very best facilities and staff.
- Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS)
- Local Care Direct (a social enterprise that provides both urgent medical and dental services and support the delivery of Primary Care services at scale to Health and Social Care partners across Yorkshire and the Humber)
- Community pharmacy (were known in the past as chemists. Like GPs, community pharmacists are part of the NHS family)
- NHS England and NHS Improvement (they lead the National Health Service (NHS) in England)
- Third sector representative (for example charities, voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises).
The programme board is chaired by Dr Adam Sheppard, Clinical Chair of Wakefield Clinical Commissioning Group. Dr David Tatham, Strategic Clinical Director, Bradford Districts & Craven CCG is also a clinical lead for the programme board.
The Senior Responsible Officers is Pat Keane, Programme Director Strategic Projects, Wakefield CCG.
Connectivity,
there are many partners, programmes, organisations and representatives that come together as part of the urgent care agenda as illustrated in the diagram opposite. We work together to form an urgent care response to shared priorities.
At the bottom of the page is a key to all the terms used in the flow chart illustration (right).
Patient experience and outcomes, across our area we want to ensure that more people receive care and support out of hospital and ensure patients and communities experience fully joined-up; are responsive to their needs and with excellent outcomes. Collaborative working is pivotal to ensuring this happens in a consistent way. The pandemic has brought many issues to the forefront but what remains is that people want urgent and emergency care that is close to home and easier to navigate.
Our vision, across West Yorkshire we aim to recognise the work happening in each of our places. By working together at scale, we have the opportunity to highlight the good practice already happening at a local level and share and apply this learning at scale.
Our priorities, the urgent and emergency care programme has recently defined priorities for 2021/22 These priorities align to our strategic vision as set out in the Long-Term Plan.
Health inequalities, improving health and wellbeing is at the very heart of the partnership and we work alongside other programmes and organisations to seize new opportunities for improving health and to reduce health inequalities and the unjust differences in life expectancy which exist across our area. This can be due to social, geographical or other barriers and some of the other preventable differences that contribute to inequality. We have carried out HEIA as part of our programme of work to help us to identify such issues. Read more about the population health agenda here. View animation expplaining more about health inequalities.
Shared priorities and ambitions across the ICS programmes, there are a number of key interdependencies and shared priorities and ambitions across the ICS programmes. The UEC Programme Management Office (PMO) has assigned portfolio owners to ensure there is an accountable interface for each workstream where there are crosscutting priorities. There are also a number of interdependencies across the three UEC workstreams, Pre-hospital, In-hospital and Safer Transfer of Care (SToC). The workstream leads meet regularly to review progress and ensure that interdependencies between the programmes of work are managed.
The UEC Programme workstreams have a focus on addressing health inequalities and ensuring equity of access across West Yorkshire for all patients. The programme is data and intelligence driven, positive patient outcomes are at the heart of our work and to do this we must understand our populations and their barriers, to be able to address and meet their differing needs.
The diagram below notes how the programme links to other programmes and priority areas.
