This week’s leadership message comes from Ian Holmes, Director of West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership

Hello, my name is Ian

I am the Director for West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership.

Over the past year we have been working to prepare for integrated care systems (ICS) becoming statutory entities.  Just before Christmas we found out that the implementation of these new arrangements would be delayed for three months, from the 1st April to the 1st July.  The reasons cited for this are to allow sufficient time for the completion of the parliamentary process and to allow health and care partners time to finalise preparations for these new arrangements in the context of significant system pressures. 

I wanted to use this blog to share an update on the work we have been doing and to provide a perspective on what this delay means for us. 

We have said throughout this process that our partnership is well placed to respond to legislative changes.  We have been operating as a partnership since 2016 and we have well established arrangements built on strong places, mature provider collaboratives and an inclusive and transparent set of leadership arrangements.  The changes reflect that legislation is catching up with existing practice.  The three-month delay will not affect the progress we continue to make - our plan is to work towards having as much of the new arrangements in place as possible from April so that we can operate in shadow through to July.

I would like to talk about staff directly impacted by this change.  People have been working extremely hard during the pandemic and a change like this, including the abolition of clinical commissioning groups understandably causes anxiety, and we know that the delay is likely to exacerbate this for some people. 

We’ve tried our best throughout the process to provide as much clarity and certainty as possible. I’m proud that before Christmas we were able to confirm to staff impacted what the change would mean for them, in terms of their role and management arrangements within our future structures.  All the work we have done to date on how our ICS will function and what this means for staffing structures stands us in good stead, and the commitments we have made to staff remain regardless of this delay.  

We are also pressing ahead with our new recruitment for new Directors of the statutory West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB).  The adverts for our Director of Finance, Medical Director and Director of Nursing closed on the 13th January. The Director of People post-closing date is 20th January. We are optimistic of attracting leaders with the right skills and that reflect values as a partnership.  The delay to implementation of the bill does not affect the timescales we are working to for these key roles, and in fact may provide a little more opportunity for new appointees to work in the role before we move to the new statutory arrangements. We hope to have completed the recruitment processes for these roles in February.

We have also been consulting on our draft constitution for the ICB since mid-November.  This consultation closes today Friday 14th January (not too late to share your views). This is an important document which describes what the ICB will do and how it will work. We have had great engagement on this document, including from system partners, scrutiny boards and members of the public.  These have really helped sharpen the focus on the document and ensure there is the right emphasis on public involvement and improving outcomes.  As a next step we are progressing work on the ‘governance handbook’ which will set out the further detail that sit behind these arrangements, including the committee structure of the ICB.  We will be sharing an early draft of this at our Partnership Board meeting in March 2022.

An in-year transition (rather than the end of the financial year) is relatively unusual and does pose additional challenges.  We have heard from finance and governance colleagues about the extra workload this will create, through for example the requirement of two sets of accounts and the double running of governance arrangements. Over the coming weeks we will be carrying out further work to identify whether there are any lower priority activities that can be paused during this period to free up colleague time. 

In all this work, we know that it is people and relationships that will determine our success, rather that governance and structures.  Over recent weeks our West Yorkshire Health and Care System has once again risen to the challenge presented by the pandemic by working together – be it delivery of nearly 1.2million vaccine jabs across West Yorkshire, establishing new services to provide treatment for people with COVID-19 at risk of becoming seriously ill, or continuing to respond to unprecedented need across all services.  This continues to be an enormous effort from everyone, and it is this that makes me most hopeful for the future.

Have a good weekend,
Ian