Posted on: 11 January 2021
West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership (WY&H HCP) has announced a stellar line-up of regional and national experts for its Health Inequalities Academy launch event taking place online 3–5 February 2020.
2020 was an incredibly hard year for people’s health and wellbeing. The pandemic brought a sharper focus on inequalities in our communities and a demand for work at scale and at pace to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged people living in our area. The Health Inequalities Academy event will bring together learning, experiences and plans for further action to be delivered by the health, care, community and voluntary services organisations that make up the Partnership.
Robin Tuddenham, CEO for Calderdale Council; Accountable Officer for NHS Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), and Co-Chair of the WY&H HCP Improving Population Health Programme said:
"Now is the time to bring the leaders in the field of health inequalities together with our local leaders to tackle the challenges facing the most vulnerable people in our society.
"It is crucial that we embed the learning from the pandemic into sustainable interventions and support that reach across all of the places that make up West Yorkshire and Harrogate. We will use our data to target our resources effectively, and move at pace to make lasting change happen."
Dr James Thomas, Chair of NHS Bradford District and Craven Clinical Commissioning Group, who is also the Co-Chair for the Improving Population Health Programme said:
“The commitment of influential national and regional leaders to our Health Inequalities Academy event is confirmation of how serious these issues are. As a health and care system we have a number of ‘big ambitions’ for addressing inequalities and we will use our enhanced knowledge about the people who have been disproportionately affected through the COVID-19 pandemic to build robust plans for interventions that will help us take them beyond the current crisis and into a better future.”
Sarah Smith, Programme Director for the Improving Population Health Programme said:
“Improved population health comes about as a result of collective action. Our Health Inequalities Academy will be a community that sparks curiosity, embeds understanding and accelerates our response across the health and care system in West Yorkshire and Harrogate.”
Dr Sohail Abbas, Deputy Chair of NHS Bradford District and Craven Clinical Commissioning Group and Chair for the WY&H HCP Health Inequalities Network said:
“The launch of our Health Inequalities Academy is a proof of our ongoing commitment to reduce the stark inequalities in our population. The academy will act as a forum to raise awareness, bring people together and provide support and examples of interventions to be implemented at local level.
“Our aim is to bring the academic rigour together with the practicalities of service provision to develop robust evidence for effective interventions that tackle the social determinants of health and answer the fundamental question of what can I do to reduce health inequalities?
“We shall hear examples of excellent work being done at our places including the Bradford Reducing Inequalities in Communities (RIC) programme which is a collaborative whole system approach to reduce the health inequalities in the areas of worst socioeconomic deprivation in central Bradford.”
You can find out more about the event and the guest speakers taking part on Eventbrite where you can also register your place and choose the workshops you'd like to attend.