Agenda item

This report is a verbal update from the York Health and Care Partnership, delivered to the board by the York Place Director, Humber and North Yorkshire ICB. The Board is asked to note the update.

A verbal update on the York Health and Care Partnership was delivered by the York Place Director; she apologised for the absence of a written report, explaining this was due to ongoing changes around the Integrated Care Board, including aspects of the Neighbourhood Health Policy, and she wanted to wait for more information on the ICB’s plans and the national policy direction on the Neighbourhood Health work so that the York Health and Care Partnership could establish its position before reporting to the Health and Wellbeing Board.

She stated that the Neighbourhood Health strategy was a core policy to the board’s 10-year-plan, and that York had been identified as being in the best position to scale neighbourhood working around the city. She assured partners that this was something which the NHS took seriously and stressed the importance of scaling change, noting they needed to focus initially on prevention and early intervention in order to ultimately be a better partner for Neighbourhood Health, and that the strategy was more holistic than just NHS partners.

She noted four upcoming pieces of guidance that were anticipated, impacting the board’s statutory duty to the Neighbourhood Health Plan:

1.    Work around the model neighbourhood, in the form of a document discussing success factors, key ingredients and so on.

2.    Guidance on new contract forms; not simply a vision or a plan, this would involve new models for single and multi-neighbourhood provider contracts with different forms to what had been used before and would incentivise providers  to deliver this model, making improvements to cash flow and work flow.

3.    The Better Care Fund, as already discussed by the Director of Public Health.

4.    Guidance on better use of physical assets; within the City of York 50+ buildings were owned or rented between General Practice, York Hospital Trust and TEWV, not to mention the many civic and council assets. To work in a way that supports people going forward it would help to have some ability to share use of these premises.

On the ICB policy direction she explained the demand for ICB’s to make a 50% reduction to their running cost by April 2026. The ICB needed to ensure its statutory functions continued to be delivered and this left relatively fewer resources for commissioning, but this remained a key focus.

She indicated that going forward, commissioning would have to focus on assessing population needs and developing the long-term population health strategy for system procurement contracting, getting contracts and incentives in place and then evaluating impact of services.

She outlined that the HWBB would still be able to engage with the ICB as a strategic commissioner, in the development of a long-term population health strategy and the evaluation of its implementation. She added that this came back again to the Neighbourhood Health model.

She discussed anticipated running cost and commissioning reductions, noting that approximately 150 redundancies were expected over the next few months. The outcome of the ICB's consultation was expected on 10 February, at which point the implementation of this would begin, which was expected to take a number of months. By summer the impact of these reductions would be clear.

She stated that strong partnership working remained vital to YHCP, but there would no longer be teams dedicated to Place funded by the ICB, as was currently the case. She felt that the model would move from the ICB leading Place to being a partner of Place.

She said the ICB had confirmed that the Joint Committee would continue to operate, reporting to the ICB and HWBB, and would remain a formal committee of both. She suggested evolving the Joint Committee to be as effective as possible in delivering the work required in York. She suggested that more would be known by the next formal meeting of the board, where she would provide a formal report setting out the operating model for YHCP moving forward, as well as the minutes from their previous meeting and a report covering the points that would have been raised, had the forward report been presented today.

She concluded that the main guidance for Health and Wellbeing Boards in the production of the Neighbourhood Health Plan had been expected on the day of the January HWBB meeting, which was one of the reasons she had delayed her report, but this was now expected mid-February and the other pieces of guidance were expected before the end of April.

There were no questions from board members.

It was thereby

Resolved:   That the Board note the verbal update from the YHCP.

Reason:      So that the Board were kept up to date on the work of the YHCP, progress to date and next steps.