Hello my name is Amanda
I have worked in the NHS for more years than I care to remember! During this time I have had a wide variety of clinical and non-clinical roles within a number of individual organisations and iterations of NHS structures in both Newcastle and Yorkshire. During this time I have also personally, and through my family, experienced the impact of the health and care services when they are great, and also when they don’t operate as we would hope.
These experiences are what drive all of us to do things better.
There are a number of buzzwords and catchy slogans that the NHS uses to describe how we want things to be. I am sure you can all think of many. Fundamentally though, whatever our individual roles across our Health and Care Partnership, we all come to work with genuine intent to deliver meaningful improvements in both clinical outcomes and people’s experience.
Within the context of growing demand for services, workforce recruitment and retention challenges, and financial constraints, delivering our ambitions is undeniably challenging. This only makes it more essential that we are prepared to do things differently. We know that the system we are working in doesn’t always respond well to change. It is up to us to be creative, collaborative and ambitious by identifying and nurturing opportunities to create the conditions in which to drive and deliver the change that we all know is needed.
We are doing this with the Cancer Alliance Board.
The Alliance has the ambition of becoming a mutually accountable system to drive and oversee the West Yorkshire and Harrogate work to improve outcomes and experience for cancer patients at a local level. The Alliance’s ambition is to deliver services around the patient rather than focusing on organisational or geographical boundaries. The Alliance also seeks to reduce unacceptable variations in treatment and outcomes across West Yorkshire and Harrogate and gain maximum patient benefit for every pound spent.
To help us achieve these goals we have developed a set of outcome measures (the Cancer Outcomes Assessment Framework) which will tangibly demonstrate the impact we are having and act as a tool which supports meaningful conversations about ambition and progress.
We have also designed a delivery framework to enable us to work in this collaborative, system-wide, way. This is different and new, it moves from an old style performance management structure where we all work in silos, to a genuine focus on delivering improved outcomes through mutual accountability. This new approach will empower local places and services to work differently together to deliver improvements.
Much is being demanded of Cancer Alliances nationally, including collective accountability around delivering performance standards and to drive the required improvements in cancer care delivery on behalf of the Partnership. Within our Alliance we have responded to these demands by developing and testing mutual accountability that we believe will be a prototype that the wider Health and Care Partnership can use as we pursue our ambition of becoming an integrated care system.
The Alliance will strive to develop a sense of community on cancer; sharing collective ambitions that we all recognise; adopting an open and transparent approach about performance and progress; offering constructive challenge where improvements can be made, and then sharing good practice and expertise to make us all the very best we can be. Working together will build confidence in how we develop transformational models and share our learning, making us better able to deliver both at scale and pace.
The stronger our cancer community, the better equipped we will be at delivering on our strategic policies such as reducing prevalence, diagnosing and making more cancers curable and living as full a life as possible after a cancer diagnosis. This will help us deliver better health and care outcomes at local level, for individual patients, across the Alliance.
By working in a new way, with a refreshed focus, the Alliance is committed to improving people’s outcomes and experience. These goals are no different to the ambition we all have in whichever area of the health and care sector we work in or lead. It is what we would want for everyone, ourselves, our families and our friends. This is why it is so important that we challenge ourselves to think and behave differently in how we collectively push to deliver this improvement.
In my ‘day job’ I am the accountable officer for Harrogate and Rural District CCG, and I want to give a snapshot of the work we are doing across North Yorkshire to deliver better, more integrated Mental Health and Learning Disability services with our main provider Tees Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TEWV). There are significant challenges facing these services. Not just an historic low level of investment as a legacy of a financially challenged area, but also significant workforce availability and geographical challenges. We know that working in the same way will not deliver the improvements that we want for our population.
TEWV and the CCG with our colleagues in North Yorkshire County Council have formed a strategic Partnership Board for Mental Health and Learning Disability. We are moving away from a traditional commissioner and provider relationship to a transparent partnership approach, using our collective expertise to focus on what matters. Where and how we invest to reduce unwarranted variation in outcomes across North Yorkshire; how we transform services by harnessing digital and technology developments and how we focus on a greater range of accessible locally based services. The Partnership Board will be collectively responsible for managing the budgets, service improvement, operational performance delivery and risk management. A key principle is that any efficiency realised through this approach will be reinvested back into local services.
It is early days in this new way of working, but we had to change and a comment of ‘this feels really positive and really different’ fills me with hope that our approach will lead to real improvements locally in services across North Yorkshire.
Over the past 18 months I’ve noticed a significant shift in the commitment to and strength of partnership working – both in North Yorkshire and across the WY&H partnership. The challenges we face are significant – I firmly believe that a new way of partnership, system-wide, working should be an ambition across all of our health and care work. This approach has the potential to unlock efficiencies and truly deliver a patient-centred health and care service. I welcome the opportunity to lead the way with this new approach through both the work of the Cancer Alliance and in my Accountable officer role.
Amanda Bloor, Accountable Officer, Harrogate and Rural District Clinical Commissioning Group
Senior Responsible Officer, Cancer Programme, West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership
