This week’s leadership message is from Rob Webster CBE, Chief Executive of NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board and CEO lead for West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership

Posted on: 24 January 2025

This week’s leadership message is from Rob Webster CBE, Chief Executive of NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) and the Chief Executive lead for our West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership.

We also have blogs from Lindsay Jensen, Deputy Chief People Officer at South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and Catherine Thompson, Associate Director for Clinical Policy, Strategy and IFR at NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board.

Hello, my name is Rob.

We have a history of working closely with people and communities across West Yorkshire. Our Partnership is built on a principle that people should be true partners in their care, and in shaping the way services develop to meet their needs. This is demonstrated in our regular updates on how involvement and engagement have helped drive service delivery, working closely with the VCSE and Healthwatch. We always try to make decisions with people, or the voices of people, “in the room” in all of our governance meetings.

Rob Webster The Government has announced that it is developing a 10 Year Plan for the future of the NHS (and healthcare more broadly I hope) and has a range of national initiatives to allow people to get involved. These are encapsulated in the national Change NHS initiative.

Across West Yorkshire, we are very keen to add to this and hear from as many people as possible to help inform this 10-Year Plan. Where we have gaps in our insight, we are working closely with others to ensure we have different ways to seek the views of marginalised communities or people who feel unable to engage with us. As a System of Sanctuary that has ground-breaking work on race equity and health inequalities, we have much to build on. Thanks to everyone involved in this practical work. We have also published some information on our website and created a dedicated hub for 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.

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 Health Plan; 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.

In doing so we will actively pursue ways of working that allow us to hear the voices of seldom heard groups the loudest – people from diverse backgrounds, vulnerable people with life-changing conditions, and people on the edge of society – and use communications tools that are accessible to all. To support this, there are a variety of formats and ways to respond to the questions that meet a range of accessibility needs. An easy read version of the national survey can be accessed here.

Please keep visiting the web pages in the weeks ahead and please also engage in the events (see below for details of upcoming workshops) to ensure local insight and additional content will continue to be added. If you would like to be kept up-to-date with our work on the 10-Year Plan, please give us your contact details here. You can also complete the West Yorkshire survey here.

People own what they help to create. Only by working in partnership with the public will we develop a health and care system that is viable, affordable, high quality and uses all of their talents in the pursuit if better outcomes.

To find out more about the West Yorkshire approach to the 10 Year Plan and how you can get involved, please watch the short animation below.

Lindsay Jenson Hello, my name is Lindsay. As well as being the deputy chief people officer at SWPFT, I’m also the senior responsible officer on several workforce projects within the mental health, learning disabilities and autism programme (MHLDA).

Having a diverse workforce and supporting our staff to flourish and look after their wellbeing is a key priority for all of us. Investing in diversity of thought and lived experience benefits patients and staff which in turn, supports recruitment and retention.

Feedback from neurodivergent colleagues across the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership has given us an insight into the challenges they face in their working life. We have also heard from managers looking for advice and guidance on how to best support their staff members and colleagues. One area that continually came up from colleagues was about reasonable adjustments, and the need to detail what they are, how to ask for them and what happens if a manager says no. Similarly, managers also wanted information about what reasonable adjustments might help their workforce, how to support requests and how to get funding for them through Access to Work (if applicable).

In response to these clear needs, we have put together a toolkit of resources to help you navigate neurodiversity in the workplace whether you’re a manager supporting your team, a member of staff looking for information and support or an applicant looking for support through the recruitment process. This toolkit is not an exhaustive resource on neurodiversity, but a helpful guide to the support and rights available to employers, staff and applicants.

Many of the resources within the toolkit have been co-produced with neurodivergent colleagues and we’ve aimed to provide the material in a variety of formats to meet people’s accessibility needs, whether they prefer to access specific sections on the web page, watch a video, read an article or download the whole toolkit as one document.

The toolkit is a great example of partnership working and was developed by the MHLDA Workforce Programme and one of our partner organisations, Touchstone. Touchstone developed most of the content through co-production work, bringing a different perspective to some of our traditional NHS processes and ways of working, challenging us to think differently. Some of the resources have already received local, national and international recognition with colleagues keen to use the toolkit in their own workplaces.

The resources are hosted on our website here and are free to use by anyone. We’re keen to share the resources widely and connect with other organisations doing similar work. If you would like to find out more about the toolkit, please contact sonya.robertshaw@nhs.net.

Thank you for reading,
Lindsay

Hello, my name is Catherine Thompson, Associate Director for Clinical Policy, Strategy and Individual Finding Requests at NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB).

As part of the new ICB operating model, the individual funding request (IFR) teams from Bradford District and Craven, Leeds, Calderdale, Kirklees and Wakefield District were brought into a single team in April 2024 but were still operating as separate functions with separate place-based panels. Over the past year we have been working through in-house processes and procedures to align these, so we are able to operate as a single function. On 1 January 2025, we went live with our single combined function for the ICB, and on 15 January we successfully delivered our first shared West Yorkshire Individual Finding Requests (IFR) panel, chaired by ICB Deputy Medical Director, Dr Sohail Abbas.

The clinical leads from each place who triage the requests have come together as a triumvirate and seem to be benefiting from the peer support they can offer each other, helping to improve our decision making and hopefully allowing more cases to be completed at first review.

I would hope that the biggest difference our external partners can see is a different email address (ifr.wy@nhs.net) and a slightly different referral form, but now we have done our internal process work we can start on improvement work to streamline the application process for our clinical stakeholders so that it becomes more time efficient and less frustrating for them, and importantly delivers a more timely response for the patient and their family / carers who are waiting to find out whether their requested treatment intervention has been approved. I’m looking forward to working with clinical colleagues in primary care, particularly general practice, and our provider organisations to find out what’s ‘tops and pants’, and how we can make things better.

I’m also keen to look at the effectiveness and impact of the IFR function, auditing the types of requests we receive and why, to identify where we might have service gaps or unmet need, and making sure the IFR panel is making clinically and financially wise decisions about what is and isn’t approved.

Keeping the business as usual part of the statutory function operating smoothly whilst designing and implementing a new process, and simultaneously coming together as one team made up of three separate place teams and half of an old core team was challenging at times. The support and leadership from our organisational development team, and the determination, resilience and can-do attitude of my team colleagues has been amazing and has made the last nine months an enjoyable development journey and a lot less fraught than I’d anticipated when I came into post last April. My team have really delivered for me, and so it is my turn to deliver for them now – which means plenty of home baking for our face-to-face team time.

If you’d like to know more about IFRs, please visit our web page or email us at ifr.wy@nhs.net.

Thank you,
Catherine

What else has been happening this week?

Meeting of the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership Board

The West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership Board met in public on Tuesday 21 January, chaired by Cllr Tim Swift. The meeting included an update from the Partnership’s CEO lead, recent government policy announcements and the West Yorkshire volunteering strategy.

The Partnership Board also discussed progress on two of the partnership’s 10 ambitions as set out in the West Yorkshire Integrated Care Strategy: our ambition to have a more diverse leadership and our ambition to address the health inequality gap for children living in households with the lowest income.

Papers presented at the board, along with the livestream recording, are available on the Partnership Board meeting page.

Work begins on pioneering new care home in Leeds

Colleagues at the Yeadon care home building site

Building work has begun on a pioneering new residential care home for people with severe learning disabilities and autism in Leeds.

The new care home in Yeadon will be the first of its kind to be built and funded by Leeds City Council, along with the ICB, providing bespoke housing and support for adults with complex learning disability and autism needs – a provision currently unavailable in the city. More information is available on the Leeds City Council website.

£12m elective care hub at Wharfedale Hospital officially opened

Katie White MP with the Elective Care Hub team at Wharfedale Hospital The new £12million Elective Care Unit at Wharfedale Hospital – which reduces the time patients wait for surgery and provides protected space for planned operations to take place – has been officially opened.

The Elective Care Hub at the hospital in Otley creates additional operating theatre capacity away from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust’s main acute hospital sites, increasing the number of patients that can be treated each week. Having a dedicated Elective Care Hub away means there is capacity which can confidently be used all-year-round.

For more information, please visit the LTHT website.

CQC rating for St Luke’s announced

Medical services, including older people’s care, at St Luke’s Hospital in Bradford have been re-rated as ‘good’ by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

As well as medical care being re-rated as good overall, the CQC has recognised improvements in the delivery of safe care and moved this rating to ‘good’ from ‘requires improvement’. St Luke’s Hospital’s medical care was also re-rated as ‘good’ for being ‘effective’ and ‘well-led’. ‘Caring’ and ‘responsive’ were not looked at during the inspection and remain rated as ‘good’.

These excellent results follow the publication of CQC reports on Bradford neonatal services, which were rated ‘outstanding’, and the trust’s maternity services and medical care, including older people’s care, at Bradford Royal Infirmary. Read more on the CQC website.

Launch of new West Yorkshire global citizens community newsletter

West Yorkshire is the home of innovative and exciting global health and care activities. We are proud to be a region which values and celebrates working in partnership with people from around the world to deliver outstanding care and support.

The global citizens community newsletter is a new quarterly round up of global health and care activities and opportunities in West Yorkshire – you can read the newsletter online here.

In each edition we share opportunities to get involved in global work, inspirational interviews with international colleagues who are making a difference in West Yorkshire, resources and insight into key issues in global health, and how our global partnerships are supporting people in West Yorkshire and around the world.

Clean Air Night 2024

Wednesday 22 January marked Global Action Plan’s Clean Air Night and an opportunity to spark a conversation about the health harms of air pollution from wood burning.

Join the conversation:

Learn more about wood burning at Global Action Plan’s Clean Air Hub
Explore training and resources for health professionals
Share facts with your community using the #CleanAirNight communication toolkit
Visit our clean air page