A Happy New Year to you all!
I hope you’re well and had some time off recently to rest and enjoy time with friends and family.
I want to begin by saying a huge thank you to all our colleagues from across West Yorkshire who have worked so hard over the festive period to deal with enormous pressures in our health and care system and to support people to stay well at home.
What is very clear to me is that colleagues across health and care in West Yorkshire want to do an excellent job for people they support, come rain or shine – or, as this week has illustrated only too well, in the snowy weather. I’ve seen and heard so many stories of staff doing whatever they could to get to work in the last few days, including colleagues working on-call to respond to service pressures, a home care team in Bradford who have been going out on foot to see patients, and countless others who have walked miles to get to work.
There have also been many examples of individuals and community organisations offering support by driving frontline staff to work or helping vulnerable people get to appointments, such as the Calder Valley search and rescue team who helped a district nurse reach a patient in Mytholmroyd on Sunday. A local farmer also helped to transport a community nurse from Upper Ribblesdale down to Settle so that he could make his visits, and Clapham Cave Rescue helped to transport members of the Airedale community team to reach a patient who urgently needed a syringe driver. Again, a huge thank you to everyone.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of meeting colleagues from across West Yorkshire. This includes colleagues working in community care, hospitals, hospices and the voluntary and community sector. In doing so I hear their personal stories of their challenges and successes, and their commitment to deliver high quality care continues to inspire, always going the extra mile, above and beyond the ordinary, to become the extraordinary. These last few days are an example of this. I would like to say thank you to everyone I have met since I took on the role of Chair of the NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board in 2022, for giving me their time to explain what matters the most to them.
As we begin 2025, the ICB continues to put people’s voices, from all backgrounds, at the heart of our work. At each ICB Board meeting, we hear first-hand about people’s experience of care, whether that’s older people’s experiences of healthcare, children and young people’s experiences of mental ill health or people’s experiences of hospital care and treatment. Listening to some of their stories is sometimes difficult and challenging as people’s experience of care can vary significantly, but it’s vital that we hear and act on what they tell us. I’m grateful to members of West Yorkshire Voice, colleagues from Healthwatch and our ICB Involvement Team for supporting the Board to enable citizens’ voices to be at the heart of our decision-making.
This insight is also key to the development of the new national 10-Year Plan for the NHS. Through Change.NHS the Government with NHS England is carrying out what is being billed as the largest engagement in the history of the NHS. The public will help shape the new plan, which will focus on ‘three big shifts’ in healthcare:
- hospital to community
- analogue to digital
- sickness to prevention
10-Year Health Plan. In the last 12 months, we have heard from thousands of people about what matters to them and what they would like to see change or improve across health and care services locally and nationally. Using this information and insight, we are mapping out what we know already. Where we have gaps in our insight, we are actively reaching out to the people and communities of West Yorkshire in many different ways to seek their views.
To help us do that, in December last year, we launched the West Yorkshire 10 Year Plan web pages, a dedicated hub for partners, stakeholders, patients and members of the public to help shape the 10-Year Health Plan, providing an opportunity to say what is important in West Yorkshire to inform the national plan via Change.NHS
Our West Yorkshire approach to involvement and engagement with the national Change.NHS initiative is twofold: to capture the views and experiences of our partners, stakeholders and local communities across West Yorkshire, enabling us to provide a West Yorkshire view into the 10-Year Plan and, provide an additional opportunity to tell us how we should further develop, enhance and improve local health and care services to further reduce health inequalities.
On the web pages, there are plenty of ways for people to get involved and share views. We want to not only hear from our people and communities directly, but if you are a partner organisation or stakeholder. or you lead a forum or group in West Yorkshire, we want to support you to capture these views to feed into the 10-Year Health Plan conversations. We will submit our West Yorkshire response to Government by the end of March this year and aim for a summary of the responses to be shared with the West Yorkshire Integrated Care Partnership via its meeting of health and care leaders in April this year.
Please keep visiting the web pages in the weeks ahead as more events, local insight and additional content will continue to be added. You can complete the West Yorkshire survey here.
Whatever your role in our health and care partnership, your hard work, contribution and commitment are all appreciated.
Have a happy and healthy 2025.
Take care.
Cathy
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