The West Yorkshire urgent and emergency care system (UEC) is a large and diverse partnership between hospitals, primary care, mental health, social care, urgent care, 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. 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 which 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 needs as well as local variances in the urgent care offer. We work collectively when it is the right thing to do for local people.
Our vision for urgent and emergency care is:
For those people with urgent but non-life-threatening needs – to provide a highly responsive and effective integrated urgent care service within the community, where more care is delivered either at home or close to where people live, reducing the need to travel to hospital, and minimising disruption and inconvenience for people
For those people with more serious or life-threatening emergency care needs – to support people in the most optimal settings (such as a hospital’s A&E Department) with the appropriate expertise, processes, and facilities to maximise a good recovery.
Within West Yorkshire there are a variety of services that offer alternatives to A&E departments however, understanding what services are available, what each service does and how to access it remains complicated for both service users and health care professionals. For many this confusion and lack of access to urgent appointments leads to an over reliance on A&E services. We know that people understandably often present at the service they are most familiar with, which may not necessarily be the service that could most appropriately meet their needs.
Our work supports more patient-centred personalised care, accessed closer to, or at, home – as part of better integrated urgent care services, working together across organisational and team boundaries. This is about ensuring that an individual’s urgent care needs can be met in a timely way from the most appropriate service. We promote an urgent care system that is integrated, with clear pathways and straight-forward referrals to increase ease of access to both patients and healthcare professionals and ensure care is given in the right place, at the right time.
Our messages remain consistent across West Yorkshire as we highlight the alternative methods of accessing health and care support and to only use A&E Departments for serious injury or a life-threatening situation.
The West Yorkshire model for integrated urgent care is illustrated in the diagram below.
View a Accessible version of the West Yorkshire model for integrated urgent care.
Our Urgent and Emergency Care Board
The West Yorkshire Urgent and Emergency Care Board is chaired by the UEC Senior Responsible Officer Clare Smith, Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust. Clare is also the Chair of the West Yorkshire Associate of Acute Trusts COO group.
The key partners and attendees at our bi-monthly programme board meetings include:
- The West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT). WYAAT is an innovative collaboration which brings together the NHS trusts who deliver acute hospital services across West Yorkshire. 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
- Third sector representatives (for example charities, voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises).
The Board’s role is to lead and oversee transformational priorities where they meet one of the three tests of partnership working. These priorities are informed by national publications (NHS Long Term Plan, NHS Five Year Forward View, Delivery Plan for Recovering Urgent and Emergency Care Services) and are also aligned with the strategic vision of the wider ICS (West Yorkshire Integrated Care Strategy 2023, Joint Forward Plan).
Due to the substantial interdependencies, the Board also promotes the objectives of urgent and emergency care across the wider partnership whilst simultaneously complimenting the various place based UEC Boards and their priorities.
The UEC programme has a focus on addressing health inequalities and ensuring equity of access across West Yorkshire for all patients. 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.