Hello, my name is Jason Pawluk and I am the Managing Director of the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Cancer Alliance.
As you may be aware, the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Cancer Alliance continues to bring together partners from hospital trusts and health and care organisations to transform the diagnosis, treatment, and care for cancer patients in the region.As an organisation, we work closely both with colleagues in the Integrated Care Board (ICB) and NHS England, who regulate and oversee our work and our allotted finances. We continue to have five strategic objectives as a Cancer Alliance, which guide what we do and how we prioritise our efforts.
These are to:
- Improve patient and carer experience.
- Harness clinical networks to improve outcomes.
- Reduce inequalities in access, care, and outcomes.
- Adopt innovation and new models of care.
- Develop our people
These are brought together in a delivery plan, which summarises what we are planning to prioritise and, crucially, how we will work in accordance with our values.
Last month, we were proud to launch our annual report as an Alliance, covering what has been achieved by working together with all our partners and you can read more about it on our website.
To give a flavour of some of our achievements which we are really proud about:
- Our Remove the Doubt campaign, with the charity OutPatients, has been shortlisted for a prestigious national patient experience award. The campaign saw us work together to breakdown and tackle some of the barriers and inequalities which exist to cancer screening for the trans community. Our system wide campaign, right across West Yorkshire on billboards, public transport and online assets picked up 84 million views – delivering crucial health messaging about the universal benefits of cancer screening.
- We developed partnerships with 27 organisations in our system from acute trusts, primary care organisations, charities, and the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector, being at the forefront of innovations to deliver earlier diagnosis and achieve holistic, person-centred cancer care.
- In terms of our plans to improve non-surgical oncology services, we spoke to more than 1,300 people, engaging a representative cross-section of our community about what matters most when it comes to delivering better, and more sustainable care. We are now recognised nationally as a system which is getting to grips with the challenge around how to manage the significant increases in demand for these services.
- We also hosted the second and final year of the Macmillan North East and Yorkshire Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) Development Programme, engaging 39 learners with 20 already securing substantive CNS posts, a huge development in an area of the cancer workforce which is also under strain
I also had some exciting news which I wanted to share with you as we continue our journey to expand and divest our clinical leadership as an Alliance, making sure that a quality focus remains as important as the metrics of access and performance when it comes to gauging success.
Dr. Helen Baker and Dr. Mat Duke will shortly be joining the Cancer Alliance as Primary Care Clinical Leads, working with colleagues in place-based teams, and also supported by the Alliance to focus on our work on improving patient experience and pathways, and the inequalities and innovation agendas respectively. Helen and Mat will be joined by Mr. Bill Cross from Leeds Cancer Centre who has been successfully appointed to a secondary care clinical lead position.
Helen, Mat, and Bill will join our team of clinical leads in the Cancer Alliance including our Clinical Director, Dr Helena Rolfe; our Clinical and Professional Lead, Baz Rodger; our Diagnostics Clinical Lead, Lynn McNamee; and our Deputy Director Michelle Beaumont who comes from a nursing background. We have also been delighted to benefit from the expertise of Dr. Laura Adams and her leadership of our work on the skin pathway.
We have also been pleased to support two of our outstanding project managers to step up into programme manager roles and congratulations to both. Karen Westaway will be supporting objective two, focussing on harnessing clinical networks and Dinah Coggon will be covering maternity leave for Becky Stokes in the living with and beyond cancer role. As it happens, Karen and Dinah also have a nursing background, but they form part of a great team which brings medics, other clinicians, and corporate professionals together for a common purpose.
This caused me to pause and reflect on something we say in our report about organisational lines and silos not really mattering to the people who use services. It’s wider than that, actually. We often know it, but perhaps we don’t quite often say it enough, and certainly not out loud.
What also does not matter to patients is the hierarchy and demarcation between groups of talented clinical and non-clinical professionals. Cancer doesn’t respect these boundaries either. What they expect, and what we need to transform outcomes, is a great service which brings the various strands and pieces together.
People expect us to work together and harness our different skills, perspectives, and traits for a common, collective good and benefit. It was this common good that also helped us all to speak out against the division and the divisiveness which sadly came to news headlines this month, impacting our organisation too. As an Alliance, we are always proud to stand with all our partners in a message of solidarity against the impact of hate and Islamophobia. We must be proud to reject it.
As an Alliance we are also proud to role model what effective partnership working and collaboration looks like. We’ll always push ourselves to do more, and to be more effective. We’ll also speak up when we need to. I’d also like to offer a personal shout out and thank you to our excellent organisational development (OD) lead in the ICB, Jo Farn, her colleague Paul Casson and the team for their great rollout of the Lumina programme which really showcases that the traits, attributes and perspectives brought to the table are shaped much more widely than hierarchy by band, grade, or professional discipline.
I’ll leave you with this thought as you either get ready for the return of all the meetings in September, or perhaps get that well-deserved break in.
Great ideas are frequently agnostic to considerations of background, discipline, or band. The freedom to innovate our thinking beyond established rules and process is often at the root of a breakthrough. Creating the conditions and permissions to innovate beyond established ways of thinking and process remains a key challenge for all leaders in the Partnership.
Take care everyone,
Jason
South West Yorkshire Partnership Foundation NHS Trust has been awarded the Triangle of Care Star 1. The Triangle of Care, an initiative from Carers Trust, is a therapeutic alliance between carers, service users and health professionals. It aims to promote safety and recovery and sustain mental wellbeing by including and supporting carers at every stage of a person’s journey through their services. More information is on the SWYPFT website.
The last few weeks have seen shameful scenes of violence, fuelled by racism and Islamophobia. The impact this is having on people across our wider partnership and in our communities has been clear. Thank you to everyone who has publicly and privately opened up about their experiences and concerns. In these times, we continue to ask everyone to check in with each other to see how your colleagues are.