Integrated Care Board meetings
Healthwatch and West Yorkshire Voice play a key part in feeding people’s voices into high level decision-making such as at the Integrated Care Board (ICB) Board meetings. These sessions take a ‘focus on’ areas such as access to primary care and mental health services. These sessions are made up of Board members, professionals, members of the public and community leaders.
The West Yorkshire Voice network and local Healthwatch listen to people and gather their experiences to help write a ‘briefing paper’ which is submitted to the board. We summarise the main issues for the people of West Yorkshire and make recommendations based on these.
People can post questions to the ICB in relation to items on the meeting agenda. These questions must be submitted 24 hours prior the meeting and will be answered at the start of the meeting. We are currently looking at ways that the process of asking questions can be made more accessible. Members of the public are invited to attend the meeting in person or watch the meeting as it is live streamed.
Here are the briefing papers we have written with input from West Yorkshire Voice members:
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)
West Yorkshire Voice was asked to lead several focus groups to help West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (WY ICB) develop its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy. West Yorkshire Voice invited people to share their feedback and ideas about what should be included in the new strategy for health and care services across the region.
The focus groups were planned alongside other surveys and events led by the WY ICB: a ‘Stakeholder Day’ and two online surveys, one for the public and one for professionals. West Yorkshire Voice spoke to 46 people about their understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion, what they thought was working well, what wasn’t and any suggestions they had for improvement.
- Accessible Communication: Clear communication adapted to people’s needs is vital to them having equal access and benefit from health and care services.
- Accessible, person centred and holistic care: It is important for people that professionals understand them as a ‘whole person’ rather than their symptoms or diagnosis.
- Design and adapting services in line with community need: There is often a disconnect between what professionals think people need and what they actually need.
- Diversity in workforce and leadership: People benefit from seeing and speaking to people like them in health and care services and would like to see diversity in leadership roles.
Make services welcoming: People want to be able to go into a service without fear of judgement and feel safe.- Compassionate and culturally competent care: It is important to people that services are culturally sensitive, and that staff understand their background and culture.
- Early Intervention and preventative care: Lack of early intervention can make things worse for people and exacerbate health inequalities.
- Creating a strategy and accountability: People want whatever is in the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion strategy to happen and for people to be accountable.
- Missing Voices: There were still many voices missing from the conversation around the EDI strategy and we need to hear from these to get the strategy right.
Please see this Equality, Diversity and Inclusion report for full details.
Neurodiversity summit (2023)
The West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership delivered ‘The West Yorkshire Neurodiversity Summit’ in December 2023. The event brought health and care professionals with partners from education, local councils, community groups, the voluntary sector, and people with lived experience from across West Yorkshire.
West Yorkshire Voice asked people who have lived experience and carers to share their views and ideas with us before the event. We have highlighted people’s experiences in this report Life on Hold.