Our Trust and our CCG partners are part of the new plans to transform and reshape care right across West Yorkshire. The West Yorkshire Sustainability and Transformation Plan (WYSTP) has been published today.

The WYSTP covers all of the six acute trusts (five in West Yorkshire plus Harrogate) and the eleven CCGs and will be delivered by local health and care organisations working together across the region to support changes needed to improve services for the 2.6 million people who live here.

STP partners will continue to work with staff, stakeholders and the public to build the plan, ensuring the involvement of everyone in future conversations around the draft proposals.

The STP aims to address the health and wellbeing gap across our local populations with a focus on supporting people to live longer, healthier lives, and ensuring a good and equitable service for all, no matter where you live.

The draft proposals also stress the importance of improving people’s health, through better coordination of services, whilst improving the quality of care received.

The STP offers an initial view of how local and regional services can be improved, what this means for the health of people locally and how we will need to collaborate to balance the books. 

West Yorkshire and Harrogate STP Lead, and Chief Executive of South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Rob Webster, said: " The STP is a great chance to work on a longer term plan that covers all services together. This is the only way we can start to improve care, meet local needs and manage our finances. 

The STP builds on local plans that have been developed in each of the six local boroughs we cover. They attempt to tackle long standing issues and improve care. They look at prevention, better coordinated services, preventing unnecessary hospital admissions and supporting people to stay well. These issues are important to us all.

We also need to do all we can to harness the innovation in West Yorkshire and Harrogate, with pockets of great work across the area being standardised and shared.

Rob goes on to say ‘the STP is already informed by significant engagement in local plans, as set out in our document on engagement published today. It is not set in stone and we will be engaging with staff and the public in the planning and design of the proposals as they progress and we are calling for people to get involved.’

For us, our service reconfiguration proposals form a significant part of the West Yorkshire STP in both the Calderdale and Kirklees plans.

For a more details including a copy of the plan, summary and engagement report, click here.