Our strategy and vision
Our Partnership has existed since 2016. It was established on the belief that working together towards common goals rather than competition is the best way to join up services to meet people’s needs, tackle inequalities and improve outcomes.
Over this time, we have, and continue to build close working relationships with partners such as the voluntary and community social enterprise sector (VCSE), NHS England (NHSE), Health Innovation Yorkshire and Humber, (HIYH, previously known as the Academic Health Science Network), universities, the West Yorkshire Police, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, and the housing sector. These partnerships allow us to continue to work together on the things that matter for people’s health and wellbeing.
Our Partnership acts as an influencing voice at regional and national levels for the 2.4 million people who live, work or study in West Yorkshire. Our five-year strategy (which is owned by our Partnership Board – the West Yorkshire Integrated Care Partnership) describes how we will do this, and the ambitions we hope to achieve.
At the heart of our strategy is our agreed vision for the future of health, care, and wellbeing in West Yorkshire. To achieve this requires all partners working together so people can thrive in a trauma informed, healthy, equitable, safe, and sustainable society. We want to help people live well and stay healthy for as long as possible. If they have mental health or physical problems, we want them to be able to easily access services that meet their needs.
Our vision
Places will be healthy. We will work in partnership to prevent ill health by improving the physical environment where people live and work. This includes having access to healthy green and blue spaces (areas with access to watercourses such as lakes and rivers) that provide safe spaces for outdoor activities and exercise and have good air quality. We want this to be the case for currentand future generations.
You will have the best start in life so you can live and age well and die in the place of your choosing. We will work to make sure people are not disadvantaged by where they live, their background, gender, or ethnicity. We will focus on supporting people to stay healthy and prioritise approaches of preventing trauma, adversity, and ill health, delaying onset of disease, and reducing the impact of long term-conditions.
There will be a culture of preventing ill health across the Partnership, making this everyone’s business. This will include; improving access to the things that keep people healthy; earlier diagnosis of ill health and supporting self-management of long term conditions to improve health outcomes. These approaches will be targeted to ensure they reach the people that need support the most.
We will focus on reducing inequalities in people’s experience of health and care services and associated health outcomes. We will also focus on equity for our staff making West Yorkshire a fair and inclusive place to work.
Climate change and sustainability will be key considerations in how we plan and deliver services. We will seek sustainable options and support innovations that reduce the impact of our health and care services on the local environment.
If you have a long-term health condition you will be offered trauma informed personalised support to self-care. This will include peer support, technology, and communities of support.
If you have multiple health conditions, you may be in a team with your GP, community pharmacist, community health services, social services and VCSE working together. This will involve you, your family and carers, the NHS, social care, and community organisations. All working together on what matters to you.
If you need hospital care, it will usually mean that your local hospital, which will work closely with others, will give you the best care possible.
Local hospitals will be supported by centres of excellence for services such as cancer, vascular (arteries and veins), stroke and complex mental health. They will deliver world class care and push the boundaries of research and innovation.
All of this will be planned and paid for once between the NHS, local councils and community organisations working together and removing artificial barriers to care.
Our people and communities will be involved in the design, delivery, and assurance of services so that everyone truly owns their healthcare.
As a Partnership we intend to deliver our five-year strategy through this Joint Forward Plan.
Our Integrated Care Board (ICB)
The ICB is a statutory body responsible for planning and funding local NHS services and is directly accountable to NHS England for NHS money and performance. Our West Yorkshire ICB reflects the way in which we work collaboratively, with a membership including representatives from NHS providers, such as hospitals and mental health services, primary care, local authorities and the VCSE, led by our Independent Chair, Cathy Elliott, and supported by independent members.
Whilst our strategy is owned and overseen by our Partnership Board, our plans to deliver it, and the NHS elements of it, will be owned and overseen by our ICB. We will continue to do this with our wider partners given that our long, successful history as a partnership shows us that we can only achieve the best health and care outcomes for people by working together. Our Partnership Board and ICB will continue to work together to deliver our vision for the people of West Yorkshire.
The way in which we work together
Our partnership has a long history of working together with strong foundations and good relationships which have helped us make a positive difference in our work to date. These foundations are rooted in making sure that we make decisions as close to the person as possible. We make sure we do this by focusing our work in neighborhoods and local places in everything we do unless there is value in working together across a greater footprint. Co-production is a key aspect of our approach and we are committed to embedding this across the West Yorkshire system as part of building a community powered health and care system.
As an ICB we delegate most functions to our five places to plan and deliver services in response to local people’s needs and to ensure that health and care is delivered and joined up at local level, and we are very proud to be the first ‘Keep it Local’ Integrated Care System in the country signing up to the approach outlined in Keep it Local for Better Health: How Integrated Care Systems can unlock the power of community.
However, there is real benefit in providers of services coming together (we call these provider collaboratives) across West Yorkshire to collaborate on agreed programmes of work. This work is in addition to working together with other partners within their local places. Across West Yorkshire we have several provider collaboratives including:
- Our West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT) Provider collaborative which has a vision to deliver outstanding, high quality acute and specialist healthcare for the whole population of West Yorkshire. WYAAT have published a 5 year strategy, aligned to the WY Integrated Care Strategy, formed around five pillars which include workforce, service delivery, ways of working, recognising and reducing variation and estates.
- Our Mental Health Learning Disabilities and Autism (MHLDA) collaborative which consists of our four mental health/learning disability trusts across West Yorkshire. The MHLDA collaborative is designed to help drive forward the system changes that need to be made, remove barriers to integration and ultimately ensure that our resident population receives the best care and support that can be offered within finite resources. We know that the pandemic has had a significant impact on mental health, and this is now compounded by the cost of living crisis. As a collaborative much work has been undertaken over recent years to transform services and this will continue through the delivery of our strategy.
- Our Community Health Services Provider collaborative, continues to work collectively to improve outcomes and make the most of resources. The collaborative has an important contribution in delivery of the strategy through both working together and with other partners. It was encouraging to have endorsement from the WY ICB towards our ambition to keep people well closer to where they live, with the need to support a left shift towards care outside of hospitals and towards prevention. We want to offer personalised care for everyone, ensuring a good quality of life.
- Our Hospice Collaborative which is built from a powerful basis of trust and has strong relationships through which it delivers a manifesto for palliative and end of life care. We plan to provide the very best palliative and end of life care for the population of West Yorkshire, which will be personalised, holistic, accessible, a good life to the end of life and a good death. We want to make sure that hospices are working in a seamless way with the NHS and palliative end of life care system, to meet the needs of patients, reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and enable patients to be discharged home or to the setting of their choice.
We choose to work at a West Yorkshire footprint where there is a need or a benefit to:
- Achieve a critical mass beyond local population level to achieve the best outcomes;
- Share best practice and reduce variation; and
- Achieve better outcomes for people overall by tackling ‘challenging /difficult issues’ (i.e., complex, intractable problems).
As a Partnership we will continue to work closely with NHS England (NHSE) on a number of areas, to make sure that we can provide the best seamless care for people and communities.
Quality improvement and transformation
As West Yorkshire ICB, we have a duty under the Health and Social Care Act 2022 to exercise our functions with a view to securing continuous improvement in the quality of services provided to individuals for or in connection with the prevention, diagnosis or treatment of illness, and in particular, act with a view to securing continuous improvement in the outcomes that are achieved from the provision of services – the effectiveness, the safety and the quality of the experience of the service.
The National Quality Board (NQB) refreshed its Shared Commitment to Quality to support those working in health and care systems. The publication provides a nationally agreed definition of quality and a vision for how quality can be effectively delivered through Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) at all levels. The refresh has been developed in collaboration with systems and people with lived experience and has a stronger focus on population health and health inequalities.
Our board is committed to protecting patient safety in all that we do and there are a number of transformation priorities that we want to make progress on this year. These are focussed on:
- mental health, with a focus on out of area (OOA) and complex needs
- discharging complex patients into community settings
- support for children and young people with complex health needs, including to reduce placement breakdown, the suitability of placements and reduce out of area placements
- utilisation of assessment and treatment units
- the development of Integrated Neighbourhood Teams
- including development of a WP primary care blueprint
- outpatient transformation
- ophthalmology and ear nose and throat
- secondary prevention
- respiratory disease: early diagnosis through spirometry and improving pathways from NHS Health Checks to recorded diagnosis and effective treatment of hypercholesteremia and atrial fibrillation
- tobacco dependence identification and treatment in secondary care (primary prevention).
These priorities focus on the delivery of the biggest opportunities for quality and cost effectiveness, and we will continue to reflect the way we work together since the Partnership began.
Our values and behaviours
As a large Partnership, agreeing the way we work together is an important part of building on the strong foundations we established since 2016. This involves building on our common purpose and vision, agreeing values through which we work and the behaviours that when demonstrated ensure that we deliver. It is important that we continue to get this right to deliver our strategy.
We have a long history of working together in West Yorkshire to improve outcomes for our population which means that the new statutory arrangements are already building on a successful way of working. We have agreed as a Partnership that:
- we will be ambitious for the populations we serve and the staff we employ
- the Partnership belongs to us all, local government, NHS, VCSE and communities
- we will do the work once – duplication of systems, processes and work should be avoided as wasteful and potential source of conflict
- we will undertake shared analysis of problems and issues as the basis of taking action
- we will make decisions as close to individuals as possible – with work taking place at the appropriate level and as near to local people and communities as possible.
