The Healthy Leeds Plan sets out the health and care contribution towards achieving this vision. The plan outlines our five year strategic vision and focuses on equitable access, excellent experience, and optimal outcomes for people living in Leeds, ensuring we get the best value from Leeds public money.
For Leeds to achieve the goals of the Healthy Leeds Plan and the vision of the Health and Wellbeing Strategy, it will need to harness the power of our city-wide enablers – building blocks for a transformative health and care system. These include our capabilities around workforce, research and academia, communication and involvement, leadership and culture, data, and intelligence, digital, estates, quality improvement and financial stewardship.
Our Workforce
The Leeds One Workforce Strategic Board (LOWSB) brings partners together to understand and prioritise the strategic actions required to strengthen and support our health and care workforce. There are seven strategic priorities of the LOWSB, including:
- Integrated workforce design
- Growing and Developing registrants
- Working across organisations
- Preventing ill health
- Narrowing inequalities
- Learning together and improving health and wellbeing.
These priorities will help empower Leeds health and care staff to support the delivery the city’s vision.
Within each strategic workforce priority there are a series of collaborative initiatives that together form the Leeds One Workforce programme, coordinated by the Leeds Health and Care Academy.
The approach taken to workforce issues in Leeds enables all partners in the health and care system to drive forward shared strategic workforce priorities in an integrated way, with the ambition of optimising investment and resource, focusing expertise, coordinating activity, and ensuring benefits are realised for the whole health and care system.
Research and Academia
The Leeds Academic Health Partnership (LAHP) is one of the largest and most diverse academic partnerships in the UK. It is a collaboration between three of the city’s universities, our local NHS organisations, Leeds City Council, Leeds City College, the regional health and care partnership, the regional economic enterprise partnership, industry and third sector organisations. The LAHP draws on this collection of world-class expertise to discover transformative, sustainable solutions that can help solve some of the city’s hardest healthcare challenges.
Communication and Involvement
The Leeds People’s Voices Partnership brings engagement and involvement leads from across the partnership together to share their work. Their common aim is ‘to improve the way we hear the voices of local people, particularly those living with the greatest health inequalities’.
The aspiration is that insight (collected from people living in Leeds) is used alongside data to give our decision makers the tools they need to really put people’s voices at the centre of decision making.
The Strategic Communications Group, and its supporting Operations group, brings together communications professionals from across the partnership. Their aim is to focus communication teams across the city on supporting the key strategic priority areas, to create insight driven behaviour change campaigns and to promote the work of the partnership to internal and external audiences.
Leadership and Culture
A focus for our health and care partnership is to deliver system leadership, culture and change focussed on developing skills and behaviours underpinning integrated care. Working as ‘Team Leeds’ our leaders have a one city voice with a shared understanding and ownership of unified positions and messages that improves the health and wellbeing of our population. Using a common narrative, we will clearly describe why we work together, what we aim to achieve, and how we will do it together. We will consistently reflect our shared vision and ambition in the plans and individual contributions of all partners.
The Health and Wellbeing Board provides leadership and direction to help influence partners and stakeholders within Leeds to achieve the five Health and Wellbeing Strategy outcomes for all people and communities in the city. The Board also uses its influence to support organisations across sectors and key partnerships to drive personalisation in health and care, transform the use of information and analytics and create a culture of innovation in the city which will improve outcomes for people. Furthermore, helping to build a strong research culture in the city, which empowers our workforce to use evidence to make a difference to tackling health inequalities and improving health and wellbeing outcomes for all ages.
Data and Intelligence
The Office of Data Analytics (ODA) is a citywide partnership between Leeds City Council and the ICB in Leeds, which aims to provide one central source of data and information to all partners, including the city’s Population and Care Delivery Boards. The ODA works closely with clinicians and professionals and supports wider training and skills to make use of the data, insight, and information it produces. Leeds benefits from an advanced linked data set, called the Leeds Data Model (LDM), which is maintained by the ODA. The LDM brings together primary, secondary, and community care data in pseudonymised form to create a picture of the health of the Leeds-registered population. The LDM contains information on population needs and disease prevalence, socio-demographics, service utilisation and (through combining these sets of information), population health inequalities This data is further enhanced by the intelligence and insight we received from communities and people’s voices supporting the boards to meet the needs and outcomes for their population. This data and insight is used to enable and improve decision making and support delivery of the city strategies and plans. The insight from the LDM and communities are integral to enabling boards to develop a good understanding of their population.
The Local Care Partnerships, with support from the ODA, are implementing a community-based model to increase digital health participation. As services increase their digital solution offer to improve access and responsiveness for patients this can often negatively impact our most vulnerable communities and we know that people who are digitally excluded are also more likely to be heavier users of face-to-face services. The city’s digital health hubs work closely with specific demographics with poorer health outcomes to support our city ambition of improving the health of the poorest the fastest. Increasing digital inclusion and health literacy provides people with the skills and knowledge to access support information and self-management tools to improve their health and wellbeing as well as supporting them in other areas such as education, skills, and employment. This, in turn, reduces the demand for unnecessary appointments and leads to fewer hospital appointments, supporting achievement of our system goals.
In addition, the development of the shared care record in Leeds will further open-up healthcare records, through appropriate access controls, to those who need to see them, including citizens. Our aim is one version and central source of data and information accessible by all partners to enable the identification and reduction of variation, short and long-term planning, continual quality improvement as well as effective operational management. Staff have training and skills to use data, insight, and information as intelligence to drive change; and citizens can access data about themselves and their community to help them take ownership for their health and wellbeing. Through the ODA, we:
- Drive efficiency and build capacity through appropriate use of technology and automation, with the aim of delivering outcome-focussed intelligence.
- Enable data-driven health and care service improvement, demonstrating the positive impact of health and care interventions through appropriate, accessible data visualisation and presentation.
- Work with partners across the city to ensure access to data and insights; and to drive improvement in data literacy, encouraging curiosity and confidence.
- Promote a person-centred approach to intelligence.
- Innovate with leading edge technology and accessible products, with a “cloud first” and “do it once, share many” approach.
- Influence, advise and advocate best practice in use of data and insights.
- Apply robust information governance around our data assets and data sharing protocols and processes to keep our information assets safe and secure.
- Apply transparency by openly publishing central standards, our processes, and methodologies.
Digital
By making better use of data and technology, and by taking a person-centred approach to service design and delivery, we will improve the way we can support people in their daily lives, helping them achieve their ambitions and overcoming any challenges they may face. The Digital Strategy for Leeds has been written to underpin Leeds’ Best City Ambition and describes the key underpinning initiatives that we will put into place to ensure people are not left behind as we move towards our digital-first approach to delivering services. Each of these foundations underpin everything we do and provides the basis of how we intend to use existing and emerging technologies to serve the people of Leeds.
- Data management, access, and use: Better collection, management, and use of data that facilitates the delivery of improved, personalised services.
- Connectivity and infrastructure: Delivery of 21st century connectivity and infrastructure that provides the backbone for world-class service delivery.
- Digital inclusion: Continuing work with people to ensure equal opportunity to develop skills and access digital tools, technology and services that are the right for them.
- Digital skills: Lifelong learning that ensures people continually have the right skills to get online, access digital services, and do their job effectively.
- Digital and data ethics: Scrutiny and sense checking to ensure that any use of data or introduction of new technology or digital service is sound, and ‘the right thing to do’.
Our Digital Strategy mirrors the ‘life course approach’ to clearly articulate the impact of our plans for digital at every stage of a person’s life from early years to older age – Starting well, living well, working well, and ageing well.
Starting well:
Using modern data technologies and techniques, we will analyse population health and other data to understand what determines a person’s health and life chances from birth through to old age. This will help us to reduce inequalities and design impactful services for the people who need them the most. We will achieve this by:
- using data (disaggregated by deprivation and key demographic variables) to identify and eliminate inequities.
- introducing new ways to stay healthy including education and services; and
- ensuring that all children can access and use technology.
Living and ageing well:
Using new technologies to deliver health and wellness services tailored for individuals and ensure that people’s information follows them through their journey regardless of the organisation they are interacting with. We will help people to stay healthy using innovative tools such as wearable monitors, augmented reality apps, or coaching tools. We will achieve this by:
- Ensuring information can be shared between partner organisations, adhering to rigorous information governance policies and procedures.
- Making services easier to find and access.
- Using automation technology to make services better.
- Launching new ways for people to stay healthy using technology.
Working well:
Building on existing collaboration by improving information flow between organisations and supporting the city’s inclusive growth ambitions. Our thriving digital community, modern infrastructure and skilled workforce will attract new and established businesses to Leeds. We will achieve this by:
- Investing in infrastructure to support the services we deliver.
- Supporting our vibrant digital economy that creates inclusive growth.
- Taking a #TeamLeeds approach to dealing with cyber threats.
- Building and coordinating an innovation network that is accessible to all.
Estates
Our vision is that Leeds will have a world class health and care estate that has great places to access services and to work, creating and supporting patient and staff wellbeing. Spaces will be flexible and fit for purpose, enabling services to be delivered in the communities here they are needed most, tackling health inequalities, and achieving a healthy population. Our estate is an enabler to support reducing health inequalities, effective system integration, digital transformation, workforce wellbeing, future growth, and service redesign, and importantly achieving our system goals.
Quality Improvement
Quality improvement (QI) is about establishing a culture of continual improvement and theory of change philosophy that is embedded at all levels of the system and can be articulated by leaders at every level and in every profession. Each organisation will continue to use their established ongoing quality improvement methodology. However, where partners come together, we will increasingly adopt a common quality improvement language, core skills, and set of tools. We will create the conditions that enable staff to identify, lead and deliver improvement and change and ensure all staff understand that they have two facets to their role: their core job (doctor, nurse, social worker, administrator etc); and the job to continually improve the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the way they deliver work.
A model has been developed to highlight the potential architecture for the QI capability at system level and this is aligned to our organisational objectives. The Leeds Quality Improvement Collaborative has been established and continues to explore opportunities for collaborative QI work and are planning to develop a quality improvement framework during 2023, based around the people, processes and structures required from a system level perspective.
Financial Stewardship
As a partnership we will undertake financial planning in an open and transparent way, ensuring all partners can individually and collectively articulate how the system acts as a steward of all resources to drive the greatest health gain for the population and the financial sustainability of all partners.