The Committee in Common met this week. This is made up of all the hospital Chairs and Chief Executives. At the meeting it was agreed to formally establish the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Pathology Network. They also received updates on the work of the Cancer Alliance and the pharmacy programme. They also discussed the NHS Long Term Plan identifying as key priorities: how acute trusts support the development of primary and community care networks, and how we deepen our collaboration through WYAAT.
To support flexible working and collaboration across our trusts, the WYAAT trusts have signed a portability agreement that enables colleagues who are cleared to work in one of our organisations to be able to work in another WYAAT trust without the need for an honorary contract and all the associated checks. The employing organisation continues to be responsible for the individual’s employment. You can read more about this read more about this here.
In last month’s update we shared with you that we have submitted recommendations to NHS England for two arterial centres for vascular services in West Yorkshire: Leeds General Infirmary, co-located with the Major Trauma Centre, and Bradford Royal Infirmary. The arterial centres will provide all complex elective and emergency surgery and interventional radiology (IR). Day case (minor surgery and interventional radiology), diagnostics and outpatient clinics will remain at the local hospitals. Following further engagement with staff and the public NHS England will make a final decision later this year.
As part of our recommendation, we agreed that vascular services in West Yorkshire will be delivered as a single service across the whole of West Yorkshire, bringing together the expertise and resources from all five trusts. Vascular surgery consultant Neeraj Bhasin from Calderdale has just been appointed to the post of Regional Clinical Director to create this service and recruitment for the Head of Nursing and General Manager roles is ongoing.
Some exciting collaboration work between Bradford and Airedale has been taking place to develop and further improve stroke care between the two hospitals. The stroke service vision is for the executive and operational stroke teams from both sites to work together, in partnership with our CCGs, to help review and improve the stroke service, driving forward performance and making quality improvements to the service. Over recent months good progress has been made that the teams are immensely proud of and which you can read more about read more about here. For more information contact Sayma Mirza, Head of Collaboration, Sayma.mirza@anhst.nhs.uk or phone 01535 292419.
Following public engagement over the last two years around the future of hyper acute stroke care (care received in the first 72 hours), proposals have been put forward to change the way stroke care is delivered for Harrogate patients. Work is currently underway to implement this, with a changeover date of 3 April 2019. Under the proposals, people requiring hyper acute stroke care will be taken directly by ambulance to a larger hyper acute stroke unit - most likely to be Leeds or York - in order to ensure that the treatment they receive is timely and effective. Patients will be transferred back to Harrogate District Hospital as soon as possible after initial treatments or discharged home and will receive their ongoing rehabilitation care locally. A communications and engagement plan has been developed and agreed locally, and is being implemented over the coming months.
The WYAAT trusts’ communications leads are working together as part of the wider West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership to support engagement around the NHS Long Term Plan, and the launch of the ‘Looking out for our neighbours’ campaign - expected to launch in March.
