Posted on: 26 August 2022
Hello, my name is Kate.
I joined the organisation in June, and I am proud to be the Director of People for the West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB).
I have always worked in workforce in people focussed roles, primarily across the health service within acute hospitals, community, and mental health, for the Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust and NHS Blood and Transplant and NHS Digital. Before joining the ICB, I worked for the past five years as the People Director at West Yorkshire Police, helping our local, very large police force shape and take forward an active people agenda – a role I very much enjoyed. During this time, I worked with colleagues across several people agenda’s including the health and wellbeing of our police staff and police officers, actively recruiting new staff, including new apprenticeship degree police officers, and developing a proactive equality, diversity, and inclusion agenda. Before I left it was good to see a noticeable increase in a more representative police force made of the diverse communities of West Yorkshire. This was a priority for us all, and I’m proud to have contributed to this very important agenda.
I suspect all of us who work within West Yorkshire, whether as a volunteer, or within health and social care, the voluntary community or independent sector or as one of the many thousands of unpaid carers would all say that critical to our joint success must be the people agenda. This covers all aspects of support from recruitment to retention, training, and development as well as colleagues’ well-being. Looking after our people, supporting colleagues to enjoy longstanding careers and voluntary roles remains critical. Attracting more people to work across our Partnership to support people and communities within West Yorkshire will always be a top priority.
This is not without its challenges - we recognise the competition to attract staff from right across the local economy and the very personal challenge for lots of our workforce during the rising costs of living, which is understandably a concern for many. I see a key leadership role across West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership to explore all the ways we can work together locally to attract people from local communities to support people into roles, with skills development that can provide the security and the confidence to try a new job and career – so they have good jobs for good health.
Why the West Yorkshire Director of People role?
What attracted me to this unique role of Director of People across the Partnership is the sheer scale of the people agenda and the potential we have as organisations to come together across West Yorkshire to share good practice, challenges, and learning. Above all our workforce must come first, without them we cannot deliver anything, and people wouldn’t receive the care and wellbeing support they need to live a full healthy life. Key to this is attracting more people into roles across the whole of the partnership, from the NHS to social care right through to voluntary community sector jobs.
We want our valuable workforce to stay and develop their careers across the system, so that West Yorkshire is a great place to live and work. Recruiting people locally to work in their neighbourhoods and towns is important to achieving this.
The word integration is key to an agenda which impacts on all of us as members of the Partnership’s workforce. I recognise that we can impact most widely in support of our people, if we can find collective solutions to some of the many workforce challenges that arise across many organisations. Some of the collective solutions already supporting this joined up approach include the Health and Wellbeing Hub and the Fellowship Programme which is seeing great results for participants to develop into more senior roles, thus enhancing the diversity of leadership across the Partnership.
This role offers the opportunity for me and the ICB People Team to work with partners right across West Yorkshire to share areas of good practice discovered from other workforce departments which support the agenda. Part of this involves supporting organisations, especially smaller ones, who often don’t have the capacity or resources to be the change they would want to see for their workforce. This potentially would involve help with workforce policies and strategies and essentially working collectively together to make positive change happen for our workforce and communities.
In my short time as a member of the Integrated Care Board I have been struck by the work already developed to support the people agenda across West Yorkshire but more essentially, the genuine commitment and recognition of how critical our people ambitions and strategies are, to ensuring that as a system, we are best placed to care and support our West Yorkshire residents. Quite simply, if we get this right for the people who work and volunteer within health and care across West Yorkshire, we make a positive step towards looking after local communities effectively.
The Partnership’s People Plan sets out the ambitions and actions to look after and develop our workforce, enabling us each to thrive in our roles. I truly see that the role I am privileged to be in, is to help bring to life the commitments of the plan. It is incredibly important that during times of pressure and personal strain we all know we will be looked after by our colleagues and by the well-being support that has been put in place for us to access, when needed.
Keeping an eye on the long-term
Some of this will take time and this can be particularly challenging when health, wellbeing and care services are under pressure and when it is evident that we need to attract and retain greater numbers of committed people into the health and care sector. Our next steps must be to focus on today’s challenges and the need to attract more people whether this be by development programmes including apprenticeships, through to expanding on the successful international recruitment initiatives already in place. What is equally important is that we don’t lose sight of the changes needed for the longer-term, with the identification and development of new roles and skills which can respond to the changing needs of West Yorkshire communities as demands on services change. Key to our approach is working alongside local universities to develop joint training programmes for students across the different health and care sectors. This is an important part of the work of the ICB People Team, namely helping to forge the necessary relationships to ensure that the system’s workforce is developing for the future.
I feel immensely proud and privileged to have joined a Partnership that is clearly committed to its people, in terms of the workforce, the volunteers, and the many unpaid carers (around 400,000). The Partnership has an ambition to ensure through our people, that we provide the citizens of West Yorkshire the best opportunity to be cared for and supported to live their own lives as fully as possible and I’m looking forward to making this ambition a reality alongside all my workforce colleagues across the whole of the Partnership.
Have a lovely weekend,
Kate