New committee bringing together mental health providers across West Yorkshire
NHS mental health providers in West Yorkshire have set up new shared governance arrangements. This builds on the close partnership working that has taken place over the past year.
Known as the West Yorkshire Mental Health Services Collaborative, the organisations have been working together to improve mental health services for local communities. This is part of the wider West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership and its focus on mental health as a key priority area.
The mental health collaborative includes:
- Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust
- Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LYPFT)
- Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust
- South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (SWYPFT)
Over recent weeks, each organisation’s Board has approved the establishment of a ‘Committees in Common’. While each organisation maintains its statutory responsibilities to its own Board and responsibility for delivering its own services, this new committee will help make sure that decisions are made together and in a streamlined way around a shared programme of work. It will see that collective ambitions are achieved, including for example eliminating out of area placements and delivering the region’s five-year suicide prevention strategy, launched in November 2017.
The four organisations’ chairs and chief executives will sit on the new committee, with the first of its quarterly meetings set to take place on 30 April. The chair of the committee will rotate every twelve months, starting with Prof Sue Proctor, chair of LYPFT.
The collaborative has an overarching set of principles, which will see the organisations:
- Working on the greatest challenges together to ensure high quality, sustainable mental health services now and in the future
- Reducing variation in quality by sharing best practice and developing standard operating procedures and pathways to achieve better outcomes for people
- Taking a collaborative approach across the region to the delivery of acute and specialist mental health services, via clinical pathways and networked services (rather than individual place / provider-led developments)
- Developing ‘centres of excellence’ for more specialist mental health services such as forensic services, inpatient child and adolescent mental health services, and adult eating disorders
- Delivering economies of scale in mental health service support functions.
Dr Sara Munro, chief executive of LYPFT, is the lead CEO for the collaborative and senior responsible owner for West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership’s mental health programme.
Sara said: “We want to make sure that mental health and learning disability services across West Yorkshire provide consistent, high quality care for the whole person which is firmly connected to local communities and where people live. To do this, we need to work together on some of the biggest challenges we face, strengthening our joint working and working in partnership with commissioners, emergency services, and voluntary and community sector partners.
“We already have plans in place to improve specialist mental health services, for example through the new care models programmes which commenced on 1 April. We’re also working to reduce deaths by suicide, reduce out of area placements and improve urgent and emergency care.”
Rob Webster, leader of the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership and chief executive of SWYPFT, said: “We’re proud that mental health is a strong focus of our work across West Yorkshire and Harrogate. People with mental health issues face significant health inequalities and suicide remains the biggest killer of young men.
“The creation of a ‘Committee in Common’ will ensure the collective leadership of the partnership working that has been taking place in mental health. It follows similar arrangements to those that NHS commissioning and acute providers have taken in establishing joint committees. The committee will oversee the innovations we are driving and it will help to make sure our work is having the biggest impact.”