Our Partnership is made up of organisations working closely together to plan services and address the challenges facing health and care services across the area.
In this section you will find links to useful information and publications about our partnership.
We are committed to meaningful conversations with people, on the right issues at the right time. We believe this is an important part of the way we work.
In this section you will find all Freedom of Information (FOI) requests made to our Partnership. You can also ask a question of your own.
People with a learning disability have worse physical and mental health than people without a learning disability. On average, the life expectancy of women with a learning disability is 18 years shorter than for women in the general population, and the life expectancy of men with a learning disability is 14 years shorter than for men in the general population.
We want people with learning disabilities in West Yorkshire and Harrogate to receive the best possible care. We also want people with learning disabilities to feel supported to have their say as they are the experts when it comes to knowing what help, support and personalised care they need.
Health and care Learning Disability Champions - What we want to do
We are working with people with learning disabilities so they can become health and care champions for our Partnership, including for priority programmes such as cancer, mental health, maternity care and hospitals working together. These health and care champions will work with us and the wider community of people with learning disabilities to further develop our plans and put them into action. We will do this by involving them in future conversations about improvement and asking them about their experience of care for people with learning disabilities. This is an approach supported by councils and NHS organisations.
We are working with an organisation called Bradford Talking Magazine (BTM) for an initial period of 12 months. They are helping us identify health and care champions with learning disabilities from communities across West Yorkshire and Harrogate. Their involvement will help us become more informed about their experiences of using health and care services so we can improve the way we plan services.
This work is well underway. Two of our champions presented at the Partnership Board in September, and we have showed the work we are doing with learning disability health champions to NHS England and colleagues across the country.
We are looking for health and care champions to work on prevention and early diagnosis, planned care and cancer. These themes are in line with what people with learning disabilities and our partners have said are important to them. Professor Sean Duffy and Julie Honeybell from the Cancer Alliance Team have already met with people in Bradford to talk about their experience of cancer screening and early diagnosis.
If you would like more information or would like to get involved with this project please contact sameena.ahmed@btm.org.uk or susan.crowe@btm.org.uk
