Delivering our strategy

How we involve our people

Waqas Tahir Diabetes, Clinical Lead for West Yorkshire Our Partnership is committed to ensuring that our approach to involvement, in all its forms, meets the needs of people living, working, and caring in West Yorkshire. No decision will be made about changes to health and care services without first talking with and listening to people receiving those services or who may do in the future. It is important that people have their say to shape and improve local services and those provided on a wider geography.

Engaging with partners, stakeholders and the public in the planning, design and delivery of services is essential if we are to get this right. Wherever and whenever possible we will include meaningful involvement as part of our work. We want people to help us design, develop and improve services by sharing their views and experiences.

Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust colleagues walking and talking We know that the people we listen to and involve need to reflect the communities we serve. We know that many people are often not heard in our system and to ensure our services / commissioning meet the needs of all people, we work creatively and accessibly to reach those whose voices, views and opinions are too often ignored or not sought. We have agreed principles of how we work together and with people and communities.

Our involvement framework describes our approach to involvement across West Yorkshire and how our engagement is helping us to tackle health inequalities. Through this approach we are able to ensure that we are putting the people of West Yorkshire at the heart of everything we do. We have used the involvement framework to guide us in the development of this strategy and this will be especially important in the development of our plans to deliver the strategy.

West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board - People and Communities Voice. Flow diagram listing our meeting groups and how they interact

How we will develop plans to deliver our Joint Forward Plan

Two women sat a table gardening with trays of small plant pots in front of them To ensure as a Partnership we deliver this strategy, we will develop a Joint Forward Plan together, which will be overseen and owned by the NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board. This plan will set out how we intend to deliver the ambitions we have set out in this strategy over the next five years. The plan will also include national NHS ambitions including:

Continuing to reduce the waiting times for people needing diagnostic or planned care (such as cancer treatments and orthopaedic surgery)
Continuing to improve access to primary care services
Reducing demand for emergency care
Ensuring that when people have an emergency or urgent need, they can be seen quickly by the most appropriate service.

Woman smiling at the camera and holding up a pillowcase that she's printed shapes on to In the same way that this strategy will be refreshed from time to time, our Joint Forward Plan will be reviewed each year. This will allow us to consider the progress made, what people are telling us about their health and wellbeing and how we might need to change our plans to respond to this. Using our involvement framework to support an ongoing discussion with people in West Yorkshire will be an important part of this work and will take place annually.

Our plans will be developed with a lens that will ensure everything we do is developed and delivered in a way that will support sustainability and tackling climate change, mitigate the impact of poverty and respond to trauma.

We will publish our Joint Forward Plan on our website alongside information each year on the progress we have made. Our initial Joint Forward Plan will be published in June 2023. You can find out more on the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership website.

If you would like to be involved in its development, please email westyorkshire.ics@nhs.net.

How we will plan for our workforce

Kitchen worker smiling Photo credit: Credit Cellar Trust Bradford We know that the pandemic has brought huge challenges for our workforce and we continue to both adapt and learn from this to ensure that we can support our workforce now; plan to ensure that we grow a workforce for the future; build new ways of working and delivering care; and build our partnership.

A key element of our digital strategy is centred on supporting our workforce. We will do this by providing the digital tools to enable efficient and effective working regardless of the location in which our workforce need to work.

Our people are our greatest resource. We are proud of their commitment to the people of West Yorkshire and the resilience they have shown through the pandemic. The resilience shown over recent years in challenging times reflects their strength and compassion and as a Partnership we want to make sure that we are supporting them in the best way that we can.

In 2021 we developed our West Yorkshire People Plan, which recognises the diverse nature of our Partnership. It represents the full range of health and care sectors, including universities, those working and volunteering in the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector and unpaid carers. The plan sets out the current challenges that the plan needs to address but also the ambition for our people. It sets out what we are doing now and what our future plans will include.

We know that in West Yorkshire there are variations in representation, access to opportunities and experience. As part of our work we remain committed to our improvement plans for staff from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds.

Equality, diversity and inclusion

Partnerhip of sanctuary - Wan and Paula walking and talking We see the diversity of all communities and colleagues as a strength to help inform the way we plan, design and commission health and care services for people living across West Yorkshire. We want to make sure that everyone is treated fairly and given an equal chance to access opportunities, ensuring that we meet the needs of everyone to ensure that our population all have good outcomes.

We recognise and value individual as well as group differences, treating people as individuals and placing positive value on the diversity they bring because of a protected characteristic or cultural background.

Our West Yorkshire Race Equality Network plays an important role in embedding our work on equality, diversity and inclusion across West Yorkshire. Our strategy is also focused on making all groups of people feel included and valued within their society or community so that there isn’t a negative effect on their health and wellbeing and so everyone can access the care they need.

Our plans to deliver will have valuing equality, diversity and inclusion at their heart, and through our involvement framework we will listen to people to ensure that we get this right.

Clinical and professional leadership

Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Trust colleagues, masked, giving the thumbs up sign Clinical and professional leadership is central to all our work, helping us put the person at the centre of our decision making.

The West Yorkshire Clinical Forum provides clinical leadership and expertise into all programmes of work.

It is supported by networks of nurses, allied health professionals, pharmacists and medical directors from across the health and care system. The forum also provides clinical leadership to dental and optometry services. The development of this strategy has been informed by their voice.

Ensuring our services are good quality

older man (stock image) Listening to clinical leaders and people’s experience of health and care is the best way for us to ensure that our services across West Yorkshire are of good quality. We also work through our Integrated Care Board System Quality Group to ensure that we are delivering our statutory quality functions and strategic objectives in a way that secures continuous improvement in the quality of our services. It also provides valuable assurance for the delegation of some functions of commissioning.

Listening to our workforce and our people is also central to the way in which we design and deliver care and how we transform our services in response to their experience of providing and receiving care.

Safeguarding people

Man drumming Our joined-up approach to safeguarding across our Partnership is based on arrangements within our five places and the statutory duties that organisations at place hold.

Our Partnership’s Safeguarding Committee spans these place arrangements to facilitate peer support and shared learning and provide an interface with NHS England and lead professional networks.

How we will use data and intelligence

Tyto care device being used by a mum to help her daughter In delivering this strategy, we will ensure that our decisions are informed by data and intelligence. Much of the data will be built upon the Joint Strategic Needs Assessments in each place, which look at the current and future health and care needs of local populations. These are designed to inform and guide the planning and commissioning (buying) of health, well-being and social care services.

Bringing together our data alongside what our people and staff are telling us will support improving outcomes and reducing health inequalities for the population of West Yorkshire. This will not only ensure that we are able to tell a compelling story as to how our services are being delivered, but also help us consider where we can best focus our efforts on improving them.

To ensure that we are doing this in the right way, we need to make sure that we understand where this intelligence is in our system and how we can ensure that it is brought together to help our decision making on an ongoing basis.

Arterial Fibulation testing - photo credit and copyright ownership: Sam Tootsie We will also gather and make sense of the data and intelligence we have, in the right place at the right time to ensure that we can improve efficiency and productivity.

To deliver the strategy and achieve our ambitions we will need to grow our analytical capacity and capability over the next five years, allowing us to deliver innovative analytical products and insights to support our plans. We will be able to do this through shared learning and development and shared resources and expertise, with the aim of all parts of the West Yorkshire system being able to contribute to, access and use, the best possible analysis of our information.

To deliver the strategy and the innovation we need to make a real impact on reducing health inequalities, we will look to continually advance the technology. We will continue to develop and improve our use of data and modelling to help us understand future health needs and the demand for our services, as well as to help us understand new ways to improve them. Our digital strategy sets out how we will use data to support decision making, design services and research to improve the health of our population. It also provides a direction of travel for how we will ensure the safe, secure and seamless flow of information between organisations to support care delivery.

Money and resources

In West Yorkshire, we have worked to a set of guiding values and behaviours which have ensured that decisions around how we allocate monies and manage financial risk have been made collectively together. We know that the budgets of all organisations within our partnership are going to be challenging over the coming years. All of these pressures run alongside the cost-of- living issues that people are facing across West Yorkshire, and the unequal impact on poorer communities. This will be felt at system, organisation and individual level.

We know that demand for services is likely to increase across all ages. The impact on some sectors such as our VCSE has also been noticeable and has threatened their sustainability, whether through reductions in grant funding or charity donations from the public alongside increased demand.

We have a strong history of working together across organisations and sectors to better use our resources to improve health and care. An example of where we have made a difference through our collective action is the deployment of £1million into social care providers in 2021/22 to allow the early introduction of the national living wage for low-paid employees. This ensured early action to tackle the cost-of-living crisis whilst also supporting a more sustainable care workforce.

This work has been successful due to the way in which we work together across our partnership to a common vision, the level of trust we have and the relationships we have built. We will continue to do this over the lifetime of this strategy to ensure that we can use our resources to reduce health inequalities and improve health and wellbeing in our population.

We make our decisions as close to the individual as possible, starting our planning of services from places and communities. Our resources enable the delivery of plans at this level, ensuring that they are used effectively, efficiently and in new innovative ways where possible.

Our 2022-2027 Finance Strategy sets out our approach to how we will use our resources and make our financial decisions to support deliver of our strategy. It outlines the actions we will take to use our finance and resources in tackling health inequalities; managing unwarranted variations in care; using our collective resources wisely; and securing the economic and social benefits of investing in health and care.

Leeds Children's Hospital - photo credit Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Buildings and estates

To deliver joined up health care and new ways of working together, we also need to look at how we make the most of our buildings (our estates). The way in which we work together as organisations across our Partnership helps us make the most of both our buildings and other assets available to us. We will look to use our estates effectively as an organisation and support our NHS trusts to adapt to the new ways of working, planning for future changes as more and more people become flexible and take advantages of hybrid working.

This work begins in our communities, using our estates to support bringing teams together to wrap around and support people, unpaid carers, communities and neighbourhoods. This extends beyond traditional health and care, looking at how we can use our estates across our wider partnership to truly integrate the way in which we work together. Our estates are led by the clinical strategy around the services that we provide.

Our capital and estates work is also important in supporting our organisations to deliver their services in a safe and effective way. In order to deliver this strategy we need to ensure that we are able to develop and prioritise bids for capital funding to ensure that we have high quality buildings that support us to deliver health and care safely, collaboratively and in an innovative way.

The way in which we will learn and develop

As a forward-thinking partnership, we continue to develop and deliver innovative ideas and solutions to improve the health and wellbeing of the 2.4 million people living across our area. We do this by working together with organisations from industry, universities, public and VCSE partners, so that we can create a culture that uses ‘innovation’ to improve people lives. This helps to make sure people have the best start in life and every opportunity to live a long, happy, and healthy one.

Our partnership with the Yorkshire and Humber Academic Health Science Network provides us with a valuable opportunity to work with a range of professionals and organisations with expertise in a wide range of areas.

Launch event for the West Yorkshire Innovation Hub Through this work we have been able to develop an Innovation Hub, one of two across Yorkshire and Humber.

One of the aims of the Innovation Hub is to support West Yorkshire to develop and foster our culture of innovation and improvement whilst highlighting areas of best practise and helping us to deliver on the system’s innovation goals. Within the Innovation Hub, there is also a Digital Primary Care Innovation Hub, which supports our understanding of and innovative work on issues facing primary care.

We also work closely with the Yorkshire and Humber Applied Research Collaborative, which supports people-powered research that aims to tackle inequalities and improve health and well-being for our communities. With themes of healthy childhood, mental health and multimorbidity, older people and urgent care, this work provides us with an opportunity to both learn and commission work in these areas to support the delivery of our strategy and ambitions.

Ensuring the delivery of high-quality research is vital and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, Clinical Research Network for Yorkshire and Humber provides the funding to support the activity to support the activities involved and helps increase the opportunities to take part in research.

In the development of our plans to deliver our strategy, we will learn from these organisations to inform our plans. We will also identify opportunities to use their expertise to help us understand areas where we have significant challenges.

There is also much we can learn from each other within West Yorkshire. We know that there is good work happening in neighbourhoods, places, providers, collaboratives and across the region. We will continue to share and learn in a collaborative way to understand where we can implement good practice and innovation into our work to improve outcomes for our population.

The way in which we will use digital and technology

Leeds Teaching hospitals NHS Trust colleagues In West Yorkshire we are embracing technology to empower people to take control of their own health and care and continually improve the way we deliver services so we can be the best we can be. Our Digital Strategy sets our vision that:

“People have a choice to use digital channels to access services and monitor their own health. Services are designed using evidence from data and our workforce can work from anywhere in the region and access the information that they need to care for the individual person.”

This will support us in our recovery from the pandemic and ensure that people can access health and care and receive diagnoses at the right place and the right time.

An example of where we have made a difference is through our online GP consultation. Whilst we have continued to deliver face to face appointments throughout the pandemic, for those who have wanted to and been able to, the opportunity to access online GP consultations has been a valuable resource.

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Delivering our strategy

Introduction

Our vision for health and care

Our objectives and ambitions

An improving population health strategy

How we will work together to achieve improved health for all