What else has been happening this week?
Award winners
Our Partnership was highly commended in a prestigious Health Service Journal (HSJ) award in the System Led Support for Carers category on Wednesday 21 November.
Fatima Khan-Shah, Partnership lead for unpaid carers said: ‘We are delighted to have been highly commended for the Partnership’s work across West Yorkshire and Harrogate. Receiving this prestigious award is great. However, it most importantly highlights the role of unpaid carers everywhere and gives them the identification, value and recognition they deserve. There is a lot of great work taking place across our area, including that of community partners and charities – who also make a positive difference to carers lives on the ground’.
Other winners across West Yorkshire and Harrogate include Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for Improvement in Emergency and Urgent Care category for a virtual ward (ACE project) which brings care to children and young people in the comfort of their home, preventing unnecessary admissions to hospital; and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust for best staff engagement. Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust, mHabitat and Advanced Digital Innovation were also highly commended for their work on the 'Let Me Show You app' in the Patient Digital Participation category. Wakefield GP confederation, Conexus Healthcare won the 'Community or Primary Care Services Redesign (North/Midlands/East)' category, at the 2018 HSJ Awards for its national consultancy and training programme on care navigation. Care navigation is a pioneering training programme developed in Wakefield that gives GP practice receptionists the skills to advise on local health and social care services that could help patients faster.
‘The value of the integrated care system is that we can share the good work, spread the learning and get improved services adopted everywhere. Huge congratulations to all winners and those who have been recognised for their hard work and commitment to improving the health and wellbeing of everyone living across our area. This is after all what we are all about’ said Rob Webster our CEO Partnership Lead. You can read more here.
West Yorkshire and Harrogate System Oversight and Assurance Group
The second meeting took place of the Partnership’s System Oversight and Assurance Group (SOAG) on Monday. This group has been established to take an overview of progress with our shared priority programmes, and to agree collective action to help tackle shared challenges. In this second meeting the group received updates on some of our priority programmes, including cancer, maternity, hospitals working together, digital work and the unpaid carers programme. It was agreed that the group would alternate topics to ensure that all 16 work streams (from the national programmes, West Yorkshire and Harrogate deliverables and enabling programmes) were covered on a rolling basis. Phil Corrigan, CEO for NHS Leeds Clinical Commissioning Groups and Lou Auger from NHS England gave an update on the development of an approach to sharing and reviewing working practices around winter preparedness. There was a discussion on what has worked well elsewhere.
Improving Planned Care and Reducing Variation Programme Board
The Programme Board met on Tuesday. This is chaired by Dr Matt Walsh, CEO for Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and includes colleagues working in hospitals, councils, clinical commissioning groups, and lay members from the public. The Board discussed how the aim of improving the ‘quality’ of referrals, that is people getting referred to the right service at the right time, will ultimately have the knock-on effect of reducing the overall number of referrals in the system by reducing those that are unnecessary. It was highlighted that once approved, the time it will take for CCGs to implement the programme’s standardised policies will vary from place to place. CCGs have been encouraged to make appropriate service changes, if they can, following the general direction of travel and prior to implementation. This will allow more time for places to consider the transformation from current policy to standardised policy, and how that will look in practical terms.
The programme also held a Building Health Partnerships (BHP) Event. Representatives with personal experience of Musculoskeletal (MSK - bones and joints) and those who provide support for people with these health conditions attended the BHP event in Calderdale on Tuesday to discuss how partnership working can help improve outcomes for local people. Attendees sketched out a vision for transformation to show what the picture for Calderdale could look like in five years’ time, with a shift away from traditional services towards a focus on prevention and alternative solutions. Conversations highlighted the fact that medical professionals aren’t the only ones who can support people with MSK conditions and we must make the best possible use of the expertise and support that is already out there in our communities. There are many dedicated support groups, organisations and individuals who can work alongside the medical profession towards this five-year goal for MSK in Calderdale.
Hospitals working together
The West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT) is an innovative collaboration, which brings together the NHS trusts who deliver acute hospital services across West Yorkshire and Harrogate. It is about local hospitals working in partnership with one another to give patients access to the very best facilities and staff.
Over the last couple of months we have been working on a number of joint business cases and on raising the profile of the work of WYAAT. At their last meetings, the Boards of all the Trusts considered two key business cases. Firstly Scan4safety- a programme which enables Trusts to standardise patient identification, location numbering and product management to ultimately improve the care of all patients; reduce clinical variation and make more robust and proactive operation decisions across the Trusts.
Secondly the Yorkshire Imaging Collaborative which describes the transformation of systems and ways of working to support shared diagnostic reporting across WY&H, including enabling radiologists and radiographers to report remotely.
Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust and Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust had the opportunity to showcase the good work being done to reduce delayed transfers of care (DTOC) in an interview with the Financial Times (due out soon). Calderdale has had some weeks where they have had 0 DTOC which is a huge change from a couple of years ago. Bradford is a national exemplar - 5th best in the country and this has been sustained over time with a rate of 1.9 days delayed per 100,000 compared to the England average of 10.3 days. We will share the article as soon as it’s published.
Our new website is in development – watch this space…….WYAAT has also launched its twitter account @WYAAT_Hospitals with the hashtag #hospitalsworkingtogether. Follow us and find out more about all the work going on.
The NHS Long Term Plan
On 18 June the Prime Minister set out a funding settlement for the NHS in England for the next five years. In return, the NHS has been asked to set out a long term plan for the future of the NHS, setting out ambitions for improvement over the next decade, and plans to meet them over the five years of the funding settlement. 18 working groups – comprising local and national health and care system leaders, clinical experts and patient/voluntary sector representatives – have been engaging with stakeholders to develop specific proposals for inclusion in the plan. Information on these groups and their work is available here. Over September those working groups organised or attended over 150 meetings with stakeholders and received hundreds of written submissions.
An online call for views has also enabled other stakeholders, in particular members of the public and front-line NHS staff, to inform policy development. More than 2,000 submissions were received through the portal, representing the views and interests of 3.5 million people. You can view West Yorkshire and Harrogate response here.
Further engagement – including two meetings bringing together trust and CCG leaders on the 22nd and 29th October – will carry on throughout November as policy proposals are brought together. This means that stakeholders will continue to have the opportunity to influence the final plan up to its publication; expected to be early December. We will keep you updated.
West Yorkshire and Harrogate Stroke Care
Keeping everyone updated on the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership work to further improve stroke care for people across our area has been a Partnership priority and will continue to be so. Since our engagement and conversations with staff, partners and the public began in February 2017, we have kept people updated throughout to try and ensure everyone had the opportunity to have their say on the development of the work. On Tuesday 6 November 2018 a report was presented to the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Joint Committee of Clinical Commissioning Groups (meeting in public), to provide an overview of progress, conclusions, recommendations and next steps. You can read the report here. You can also read this letter sent to all stakeholders informing them of the decision made by the Joint Committee of Clinical Commissioning groups. The decision from the Joint Committee of Clinical Commissioning Groups concludes the West Yorkshire and Harrogate work on hyper acute stroke services. We would like to thank everyone for their involvement on the West Yorkshire and Harrogate stroke care work. You can find out how your views have shaped our work by reading 'You said, we did'. You can also find out about all the engagement that has taken place here.
What’s happening next week?
- The West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership Public Health Co- ordination Group meeting takes place on Monday. This is chaired by Dr Ian Cameron, Director for Public Health, Leeds City Council.
- Webinar for NHS Communicators on the long term plan will be held on Monday.
- A meeting will take place on Wednesday to look at co-opted members to the Partnership Board for public representation.