Hello my name is Ian

I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on two new developments this week.

First, we received notification on Tuesday, ahead of the announcement on Wednesday by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Jeremy Hunt that we will receive around £25million funding for the STP capital bids wave 3 we put forward in September 2017. The funding is part of the £2.6bn of capital funding, announced at Autumn Budget and is being allocated to a number of STPs across England to accelerate service modernisation. This latest round of announcements will see £760 million being allocated to capital schemes. Others include Shrewsbury and Telford STP, NHS Services in Kent and a mental health collaborative in London. You can read more here

Our Directors of Finance worked alongside partnership colleagues to submit six bids and we have been allocated funding for four. These are:

National pathology exchange [£2million] - To deliver a lab-to-lab messaging solution that connects Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) together across the area to facilitate the electronic transfer of pathology test requests and results. This will be led by the Health Informatics Service which is a shared service hosted by Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust.

Telemedicine in care homes [£1.5million] - An opportunity for WY&H to generate savings across the health economy, firstly, by the commissioning of the Airedale NHS Foundation Trust (ANHSFT) care home telemedicine service across a number of our care homes in the WY&H area, and secondly, through the additional enhanced services made possible by the upgrading of infrastructure. The funding will enhance the current and future Digital Care Hub infrastructure. The significant benefits generated from this proposal would be across the WY&H area through reduced activity pressures being generated from nursing homes – most importantly improving people’s care. This will be led by Airedale NHS Foundation Trust.

Scan for Safety [GS1 - £15million] - GS1 is a global not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the design and implementation of standards that improve organisational efficiency. GS1 has defined standards to enable clear identification of such things as patients, caregivers, locations, products, assets and records, and enables accurate management and tracking and tracing of medicines, medical devices and instruments throughout the supply chain through to the patient record.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is currently a demonstrator site nominated and funded by the Dept. of Health, and the other acute trusts can benefit from their experience of GS1 roll out. The work will increase data accuracy and reliability enabling improved analytics and decision making; patient safety and experience improvements through “right patient, right product, right treatment”. This work will support the roll-out in the other five NHS acute providers in West Yorkshire and Harrogate.

Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative [£6.1million] - The funding will be used for the collaborative procurement of imaging solutions to transform radiology services to meet some of the capacity and demand issues. Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative will improve quality and create efficiencies across the above key areas of the radiology service, and will then provide the opportunity for further regional clinical service transformation. This work is being led by the Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative which comprises the six NHS acute providers in West Yorkshire and Harrogate plus a further two NHS acute providers from outside our health and care partnership.

This is really positive news and reflects our collective priorities for people living across WY&H. Considerable effort and commitment from many partners has helped us to get to this point and we are now in an even stronger position to move forward together.

We remain positive that other funding schemes will be successful in further announcements and Jonathan Webb our WY&H HCP Finance Director will be working with finance colleagues to seek feedback on how best we move forward with those bids which were not successful at this stage to consider wave 4 applications. Thanks to everyone who worked hard on all the bids and in particular our Directors of Finance and their teams.

Secondly, a new area of work we are developing around a system leadership executive shadow board.

Our executive group meets every four weeks and includes leaders from across our partnership, including councils, hospitals, clinical commissioning groups, community health, voluntary and community organisations. The role of the executive group is to give oversight on the work of the West Yorkshire and Harrogate programme priorities, which includes finances, communications and organisational development - whilst keeping firmly in view the important work that takes place in each of our six local places (Bradford District and Craven; Calderdale, Harrogate, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield).

We have recently received funding from the NHS Leadership Academy to develop ‘a shadow system leadership executive group’ for our partnership. The programme builds on the successful work of the Shadow Board Programme www.theshadowboard.com and applies the approach to the collaborative leadership model we are establishing for our partnership.

There are three core objectives of the programme:

  • To develop our system leaders of the future
  • To increase the sphere of influence and understanding of the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care partnership
  • Add value and challenge to the topic of conversation discussed by the System Leadership Executive.

The shadow board will run over the next six months, with support from the NHS Leadership Academy. We have also engaged the Inspiring Leaders Network to lead this initiative and are working with them on the design of the programme. We intend to run the shadow system leadership executive group the day immediately before the leadership day – the first Monday of the month.

We have had a fantastic response to the programme from leaders across West Yorkshire and Harrogate and are looking forward to getting started I am grateful to Karen Vella and Jayne Collingwood (from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust) and Andrew Cribbis (from South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust) for leading the thinking on this work.

Have a good bank holiday weekend

Ian

What else has been happening this week?

Stroke Programme Board

The Stroke Programme Board met on Tuesday. The meeting was chaired by Dr Andy Withers, who is also the Chair for the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Clinical Forum. Jo Webster is the commissioning lead. Colleagues welcomed Rubeka Begum, from the Stroke Association and John Metcalf, our new patient and public representatives for the work. Their role will be to help ensure that communities are reflected in the board’s work. Rubeka gave an overview on the Stroke Association, and talked about services and support, prevention, awareness raising, research, fundraising and volunteering. In particular Rubeka talked about the personalised support they give to people who have had a stroke and their carers for up to 12months.

Chris Mannion (Local Workforce Action Board) gave an update on workforce developments. There was also a discussion around seven day standards and an update on the public events taking place across the area this week. The thrombectomy group met last week and Dr Graham Venables gave an update on the meeting. Thrombectomy takes place 6-16 hours after a stroke symptom onset and is used to reduce disability for people.

Voluntary and community organisations

Soo Nevison and Hannah Howe organised an event in November for voluntary and community partners about the work of West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership.A follow up event took place in December. A number of VCS colleagues expressed an interest in getting involved in our programme priorities, including mental health, urgent care, and community initiatives - the intention being for them to cascade information across the sector. Programme leads have been matched to VCS leads for further conversations and wider involvement.

West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership Public Health Co-ordination Group

Public health colleagues met on Monday. The group is chaired by Dr Ian Cameron. The group discussed the development of our memorandum of understanding and preventing ill health priorities, including smoking and alcohol. You can watch this short film featuring Corinne Harvey to find out more.

West Yorkshire and Harrogate Area Partnership Group

The first meeting of the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Area Partnership Group took place on Wednesday. The importance of effective partnerships is a core feature of all of our work, and this forum has been established to strengthen our joint working with regional staff side. This will help to ensure we fully support improvements in staff health, safety and wellbeing, whilst also keeping people informed of the work taking place at a WY&H level.

The meeting was chaired by Rob Webster, our CEO Partnership Lead and included Ian Holmes, Director for the WY&H Health and Care Partnership; Andrew Jones, HR Director from Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust; Mike Curtis, Regional Director for Health Education England; and David Prater, NHS Employers.

The terms of reference (ToR) for the group were discussed and it was agreed that these would mirror the South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Accountable Care System (ACS) principles. These principles set out how the partners will work together to promote effective partnership working. The draft will be shared at the WY&H HCP executive leadership group meeting on Tuesday, where the leadership team will be asked to ratify them as part of an agreement to underpin workforce developments. These will then be published on our website.

The next meeting will take place in two months-time. The agenda will include WY&H programme timelines, the MoU and ICS update and the workforce plan for further staff engagement.

What’s happening next week?

  • Our clinical forum meets on Tuesday.
  • The Joint Committee of the 11 Clinical Commissioning Groups meets in private on Tuesday.
  • The System Executive Leadership Group meets on Tuesday.
  • On Wednesday the primary care and community work stream meets.
  • On Friday colleagues from the six acute trusts will come together to discuss digital maturity and talk about how they plan to progress over the next few years.
  • The three clinical commissioning groups (CCG) in Leeds - NHS Leeds North CCG, NHS Leeds West CCG and NHS Leeds South and East CCG – are set to become a single organisation from 1 April [Sunday].The three organisations are already working in a formal partnership, and plans to create a single organisation were first put forward in 2017. Following engagement with local stakeholders and the CCG’s Governing Bodies, GP member practices voted overwhelmingly to support the proposal. A formal application to merge was then given the go-head by NHS England.