Healthwatch across West Yorkshire work closely with the NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) to embed the voice of the people of West Yorkshire, into the NHS West Yorkshire ICB level Committees. This is to ensure that people’s experiences of health and care across West Yorkshire are influencing the decisions taken at this important decision-making level.
Local Healthwatch in Bradford, Calderdale, Craven, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield work together to bring insight, expertise and challenge into the West Yorkshire decision making structures.
A representative from Healthwatch is a member of each of the key NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board Committees and acts as a critical friend, challenging appropriately and providing real-time intelligence from people across West Yorkshire, to influence decision making.
West Yorkshire Voice
West Yorkshire Voice is a network that brings together individuals, groups, local panels, networks, and organisations to ensure the voice of people is at the heart of health and care decision-making in West Yorkshire and allows the people of West Yorkshire to hold the Integrated Care Board to account.
West Yorkshire Voice has contributed to vital work around Neurodiversity services, collating experiences from members of the network who have lived experience of autism and ADHD in preparation for the West Yorkshire Neurodiversity Summit, led by the West Yorkshire Mental Health Learning Disability and Autism Partnership in winter 2023. West Yorkshire Voice members were also supported to attend the Summit to be directly involved.
West Yorkshire Voice have been involved in the Healthwatch Dental Services Working Group for West Yorkshire. This aims to create dentistry services that reflect the needs of West Yorkshire's communities and continues to support the Integrated Care Board in improving access to NHS dental services.
West Yorkshire Voice are developing a way to regularly check-in with the people of West Yorkshire to find out what’s important to them and will feed this directly into the Integrated Care Board.
Influencing decision making
Insight captured by local Healthwatch and via West Yorkshire Voice is used to escalate themes and risks to committee leads to help inform agenda setting for the meetings.
Agendas are shared across, and input given by local Healthwatch to ensure each committee representative can speak for Healthwatch and people’s voices across West Yorkshire.
Work has specifically focused on the Integrated Care Board meetings ensuring that the voices of the people of West Yorkshire frame and are central to each NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board meeting.
Over the past 12 months, the Board of NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board has addressed important themes such as GP access, children and young people mental health, access to NHS dentistry.
Healthwatch and West Yorkshire Voice play a key part in feeding people’s voices into the pre-engagement sessions at West Yorkshire ICB Board meetings; these sessions take a ‘focus on’ areas such as access to primary care and mental health services.
The West Yorkshire Voice network and local Healthwatch gather insights that inform a briefing paper submitted by Healthwatch across West Yorkshire, to put people’s voices into conversations around the ‘focus on’ areas in the Board meeting. This has led to real impact on decision making such as a commitment that the insights and recommendations gathered through West Yorkshire Voice and presented in a winter planning briefing paper will be used to inform winter planning 2024/25, and recommendations from the access to primary care briefing paper being taken into action planning conversations around a new model of delivery.