This week’s blog is all about technology and how it has, and will support the ambitions of our health and care partnership.

First of all, let’s touch on terminology.  The work I lead on alongside my colleagues is all about ‘Digital and Interoperability’ but what does that mean?

It could be described as technology and how we use IT to support and integrate the health and care system. However put simply – it’s all about getting IT systems to talk to one another so we can improve the way our staff work and importantly the services we provide to people.

Interoperability remains a major challenge for healthcare IT. Despite efforts to make systems talk to each other – many don’t - and although there is some excellent work taking place across WY&H – there is still much to do and the opportunities are endless.

I’m conscious that as technologists we can speak what seems to be another language. However, the end goal is to work with clinicians, citizens and health and care professionals to ensure what we deliver is what our partnership strives to achieve i.e. better health outcomes for people.

Funding for digital technology is scarce. This means that getting our relationships and conversations right is essential – especially if we want to attract additional money into our area to do this important work.

To help us work better we have allocated our technology leaders across the patch to be ‘go to’ points for each of our partnership priorities, for example cancer, maternity, mental health and urgent care. 

We also need to ensure that any local, ‘place-based’ (Bradford District and Craven; Calderdale, Harrogate, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield) investment in technology is complementary to the technology we need across WY&H, and beyond. I’ll give you an example of one of our recent successes that might be invisible to most.

Wouldn’t it be good if our staff could work across all public sector buildings as flexibly as possible? Wouldn’t it be good if integrated care could be delivered from a range of public sector buildings and still access the IT systems they require? At present achieving this is complex and costly.

For the last couple of years 60+ organisations across Yorkshire and Humber have been working together to procure a standardised network that would underpin our ability to support integrated services. They are doing this using local funding to deliver a joint strategy. The contract was awarded in May and our network links to buildings will be replaced over the next couple of years, saving the public sector money and improving our capability to work together. If we had not worked together there would have been 60+ variations and we wouldn’t be any further forward!

Over 190,000 of our residents now have access to free public Wi-Fi within their GP practice. Doing so has also led to a new tele-dermatology service in Leeds between primary and secondary care that together utilise the new secure Wi-Fi in GP practices. Teledermatology is the use of high quality medical photography as a tool to diagnose dermatological conditions.

Across WY&H over 700,000 patients have now registered to be able to book and cancel appointments with their GP practice online. Just think of the convenience and reduced administration enabled by this facility. WY&H are also making excellent progress towards switching off all paper-based referrals from GPs to hospital consultants by the autumn.

Thinking about our future digital ambitions, our number one priority is the appropriate sharing of clinical information to enable integrated health and care records. Excellent progress has been made within our local places to enable this. Bradford and Calderdale have recently implemented the largest instance of a hospital integrated record in Europe. Leeds has over 5000 users of the Leeds Care Record. Harrogate and District are rolling out an electronic record in collaboration with Northern Lincolnshire and Goole. Leeds and York Partnership will be implementing a new care record over the next 18 months. However, if we are not careful these will simply become information ‘islands’.

The good news is that through hard work Yorkshire and Humber has recently been identified as one of five areas nationally to be awarded the status of a Local Health and Care Record Exemplar (LHCRE).  This means that we can continue to improve clinical information systems locally but we can also create a ‘system of systems’, joining these islands together to improve clinical care across our region.

So, a lot going on and we’ve only just scratched the surface! Our work at partnership level is to make technological sense of what’s going on, clinically and digitally and we look forward to further conversations.

Have a good weekend

Alastair

What else has been happening this week?

Local place planners meeting

Our local place planners met this week (Bradford District and Craven; Calderdale, Harrogate, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield). Colleagues discussed feedback from Leadership Day last week (please see last week’s blog); a paper presented on housing and health (the importance of the housing sector in terms of directly influencing health outcomes, supporting prevention and reducing demand in the NHS and wider public services); NHS RightCare Respiratory insight; operational planning 2019/20 and communications and engagement, which included a meeting on Tuesday about the development of a public panel for WY&H work. This would complement the public, patient, involvement assurance group in place to support the work plan of the Joint Committee of the CCGs.

Public panel development

On Tuesday a small working group of representatives from local public, patient groups met to co-produce a mechanism for providing assurance that there is authentic patient and public involvement in our Partnership work. Over 15 people attended from various organisational roles, including Trust governors, clinical commissioning groups and chairs from MESMAC and Trans-Mission. Attendees discussed the report findings from the first meeting in April when over 40 people attended. They discussed the role they and others could play in ensuring the wider Partnership work keeps the public at the very heart of decision-making. Being open and transparent is very important as is assuring meaningful public engagement.  The group also discussed the next steps, which includes developing a core assurance group to ensure continuity. Keeping the views of young people is essential and Jill Dufton (Partnership Engagement Manager) updated the group on the work we are doing with youth forums. You can read more here.

Everyone agreed that this was the start of an exciting opportunity to shape effective public, patient, involvement assurance for the Partnership.  A priority would be to establish clear principles of working and assurance standards, learning from existing good practice in our six local places (Bradford District and Craven; Calderdale, Harrogate, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield). 

West Yorkshire and Harrogate Priority Programmes

Our programme leads met on Thursday. This included colleagues working on cancer, urgent care, maternity, primary care, elective care and standardisation polices. Colleagues received an update from Rachael Loftus, Head of Regional Health Partnerships on her work with councillors and local authorities around the work at a local place and WY&H level. Programme leads also discussed the development of the WY&H Health and Care Partnership Assurance Framework, for example around patient, public involvement; equality checklists and quality impact assessments.

What’s happening next week?

  • The personalised care steering group meets on Monday.
  • West Yorkshire and Harrogate Communications and Engagement Network meet on Tuesday in Bradford.
  • There is a continuity of carer support visit by the national team to West Yorkshire and Harrogate Local Maternity System on Wednesday.