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South Yorkshire Integrated Care Partnership Strategy. March 2023

Working together to build a healthier South Yorkshire
 

Introduction

South Yorkshire has much to be proud of with our strong and vibrant communities, proactive voluntary sector and a broad range of health and care services providing a strong foundation for improvement.

South Yorkshire developed around the industries of mining and steel and this industrial heritage means our close communities have a deep sense of place and identity. These have developed into a diverse and vibrant economy with health and care, advanced manufacturing, research and education being significant industry sectors across South Yorkshire. We are a diverse and welcoming county with outstanding natural, heritage, cultural and artistic assets. We are geographically compact and fortunate in our location, in that we have good access to open green spaces, including the western edge of Sheffield and Barnsley bordering the Peak District National Park. All this contributes to South Yorkshire being a great place to be born, live and work.

In South Yorkshire we want everyone to live happy and healthier lives for longer. We are living in difficult times, managing the lasting impact of covid 19 and the increasing cost of living challenges. Our engagement work found that good access to high quality care and support is really important to people in South Yorkshire and as a Partnership we are making joint commitments to improve this.

We will continue to work with you, listen to you, involve you and respond actively to what you tell us.

This Strategy was developed between September and December 2022 by our newly formed Integrated Care Partnership and covers the years up to 2030. It is a legal requirement and we see it as a beginning of a journey with the people and communities of South Yorkshire. We will work with communities and our voluntary, community and social enterprise sector.

This strategy and the plans that support delivery will change and improve through your involvement, including our NHS Joint Forward Plan. The health and wellbeing of everyone matters to us all. We look forward to working with each of you for a happy, healthier South Yorkshire.
 

Foreword by the Mayor of South Yorkshire - Oliver Coppard

This strategy is a test; a test we are setting ourselves. Included in that test are questions we have asked ourselves before. And if we do not rise to the challenge this time, we will be back here again in a few years’ time to ask ourselves those questions again. And within those intervening years yet more people – our friends, colleagues and neighbours – will have had their lives blighted, their careers cut short, and their happiness undermined by ill health.

So I am determined we will make a positive difference to the health of our communities across South Yorkshire, and this strategy is where we start. We have to challenge ourselves to think radically about what we do and how we do it.

That’s why this strategy is so important as we look ahead over the next decade to 2030. If we achieve the goals in this strategy we will improve the health of our communities across Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster and Sheffield, tackle deep seated inequalities in health outcomes and access, make the most of the resources we have, and make sure our health and care services support our wider objectives as a region; making South Yorkshire a healthier, wealthier and happier place.

If we’re going to achieve those goals, we will need to use not just the £3.8bn spent on health and care but also the wider £16bn of public services spent in South Yorkshire each year to help those who need it most. We will need our 72,000 strong health and care staff to have the skills and resources they need to support our communities.

We need all our public services, such as employment support, transport and housing, to promote good health. We will need to listen to and strengthen our voluntary and community sector and recognise them as the equal partner they are. And we will need to put the lived experiences of our diverse communities at the heart of the way in which we work.

There are no shortage of great assets and examples of good practice across South Yorkshire upon which we can build however, there is no denying the scale of the challenge we face; those challenges are longstanding and complex. Some people in our communities will live shorter lives than others, by as much as nearly a decade in some cases. Life expectancy in South Yorkshire is no longer going up, something that has not happened in the last 40 years.

There is healthy life expectancy gap of 20 years between some of our communities. And around a third of people across our region are living in some of the most deprived parts of our country.

So the challenges are undeniable. But there is nothing inevitable or insurmountable about them. If we are going to overcome those challenges, together, we must do things differently.

Our commitment to you, our 1.4 million strong community across South Yorkshire, is to work in partnership together, to do things differently, to focus our people and our resources on those that need them the most, and to accelerate our focus on prevention and early identification. And through all of this we will continue to put our community’s voices and needs first.

This is our plan for a happy, healthier South Yorkshire.

Oliver Coppard, Mayor of South Yorkshire

 

Our Shared Outcomes, Bold Ambitions and Joint Commitments

The vision is that Everyone in our diverse communities lives a happy, healthier life for longer

The goals are Healthier and Longer Life, Fairer Outcomes for all and Access to quality

Health and Wellbeing support and care.

The shared outcomes are:

  • Best start in life for Children & Young People.
  • Living healthier and longer lives AND improved wellbeing for those with greatest need.
  • Safe, strong and vibrant communities.
  • And, People with the skills and resources they need to thrive.

 

The bold ambitions are:

  • Focus on development in early years so that every child in South Yorkshire is school ready.
  • Act differently together to strengthen & accelerate our focus on prevention and early identification.
  • Work together to increase economic participation and support a fair, inclusive and sustainable economy.
  • And, Collaborate to value & support our entire workforce across health, care, VCSE, carers, paid, unpaid. Developing a diverse workforce that reflects our communities.

 

The joint commitments are:

  • Bold, visible and collaborative leadership.
  • Identifying, recognising and tackling systemic discrimination including a focus on anti-racism
  • Reallocation of resources to where there is most need
  • Joined up service delivery and support
  • Listening and co-production with people and communities
  • Create a culture of learning and innovation

 

Bold Ambitions

This strategy to better health, recognises the work already ongoing and set out in strategies and plans in each of our places and across South Yorkshire. Our intention is not to duplicate these but to build on them. This strategy sets out where, as a whole partnership working together, we can add value to go further faster with a targeted number of action focused bold ambitions which can only be achieved by the Integrated Care Partnership joining forces to practically align collective power and influence to enable delivery at pace and at scale. The next step is to do the work to agree together the specific actions we need to take to deliver on these ambitions.

  1. Focus on development in early years so that every child in South Yorkshire is school ready. Raise the level of school readiness in South Yorkshire and close the gap in those achieving a good level of development between those on free school meals and all children by 25% by 2028/30.
  2. Act differently together to strengthen & accelerate our focus on prevention and early identification. With a focus on the four main modifiable risk factors, smoking, healthy weight, alcohol and hypertension and early identification and management of the main causes of premature mortality in South Yorkshire. Specifically acting together to strengthen our focus on reducing smoking to reduce the levels of smoking to 5% by 2030
  3. Work together to increase economic participation and support a fair, inclusive and sustainable economy. Reduce the economic inactivity rate in South Yorkshire to less than 20% across our places by 2028/30. Reduce the gap in the employment rates of those with a physical or mental health long term condition (as well as those with a learning disability) and the overall employment rate by 25% by 2028/30. Enable all our young people that are care leavers in South Yorkshire to be offered the opportunity of good work within health and care by 2024. Establish a South Yorkshire Citizens Assembly for climate change and accelerate progress towards environmental statutory emissions and environmental targets.
  4. Collaborate to value & support our entire workforce across health, care, VCSE, carers, paid, unpaid. Developing a diverse workforce that reflects our communities. Develop a Workforce Strategy that will enable us to collaborate across South Yorkshire to educate, develop and support our entire workforce. For our statutory partners to accelerate progress towards a workforce that is diverse and representative of all our communities. Contribute to South Yorkshire becoming an anti-racist and inclusive health and care system through everything that we do and how we do it with our communities. Committing to real actions that will eradicate racism.

 

Our vision, strategic goals and shared outcomes for South Yorkshire

To achieve our vision of ‘Everyone in our diverse communities lives a happy, healthier life for longer’, there are some serious challenges to overcome. South Yorkshire has a significant proportion (37%) of people living in the most 20% deprived areas nationally. Life expectancy in South Yorkshire is no longer increasing. Not only are people in South Yorkshire dying younger, they are living fewer years in good health. There is also a significant difference in the number of years people can expect to live in good health, with those living in the most deprived areas dying up to nine years earlier compared to people living in more affluent areas across South Yorkshire communities.

The gap in life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas is also widening. Our commitment in this strategy is to change this. The Covid pandemic has further exposed these deep inequalities and it is evident that the current cost of living crisis has further exacerbated these disparities. South Yorkshire with its relatively lower level of earnings and employment is particularly vulnerable. Health inequalities are not inevitable and by definition are preventable. It is within this challenging context that we have come together to develop our South Yorkshire Integrated Care Partnership with refreshed energy and renewed commitment to collaborate as partners and work with our local communities of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield to work differently together to address health inequalities and improve the health and wellbeing of all people living in South Yorkshire.

Our aim is to:

  • Halt the stall in Life Expectancy in South Yorkshire and improve it by three years by 2028/30.
  • Halt the stall in Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) and close the gap between South Yorkshire and
  • England by 2028/30.
  • Close the gap in healthy years lived between the most and least deprived groups in South Yorkshire

 

Our vision and goals are supported by four shared outcomes which are reflected in all our current Health and Wellbeing Board Strategies in each of our places. These shared outcomes align well to the life courses of Starting Well, Living Well and Aging well and act as an enabler in this strategy for current plans.

These are:

  • Children and young people have the best start in life
  • People in South Yorkshire live longer and healthier lives AND the physical and mental health and
  • wellbeing of those with the greatest need improves the fastest
  • People are supported to live in safe, strong and vibrant communities
  • People are equipped with the skills and resources they need to thrive

 

In this strategy we will set out a focussed number of bold ambitions to support achievement of our shared outcomes which can only be achieved by all partners working together. We will work together to address the wider social, economic, environmental and commercial determinants of health.

 

Listening to our communities in creating this Strategy

A quote from a South Yorkshire Citizen submitted as part of the What Matters to You exercise

What matters to my health and wellbeing is having care systems that work for the patient. I have complex health needs so I need a health system that connects services together. In theory this happens but in reality it does not. I spend a lot of my time connecting the missing dots, sharing missed letters between professionals so we can have wider conversations about my health as one condition can affect another. End of quote.

As an Integrated Care Partnership we have a clear commitment to ongoing engagement with our communities. When developing this strategy we started by understanding what matters to people living in South Yorkshire by gathering insight from a wide range of engagement and involvement activities undertaken in South Yorkshire in the last two years by our ICP partners, from 284 different sources. We then asked our communities as simple question to build on this: ‘What Matters to You’?

This campaign took place over November and December 2022. Working with our local Healthwatches and VCSE, we reached out to as many people as possible in South Yorkshire, including our health and care workforce, children and young people, under-represented and socially excluded groups, and asked ‘What matters to you about your health and wellbeing?’. More than 500 individuals and groups responded.

The feedback from the insight work and the campaign has been actively used to shape and inform our Strategy. The insight work identified that there was a need for more information about health prevention and availability of different health and social care services, to make it easy for people to access health and social care services and removing barriers and to provide people with the information, tools and capacity to manage their own care. These themes of awareness, access and agency were replicated in the responses to the ‘What matters to you about your health and wellbeing?’ question.

Individuals and groups said their highest priorities were access to and quality of care, improving mental health and wellbeing, support to live well, the wider determinants of health, and affordability, given the pressure on the cost of living. All of these themes have been used to shape our strategy. To improve access to services we know that we need to address increasing waiting times. Improving access to primary care, urgent and emergency care, mental health services and hospital services are a key area of focus for our immediate delivery plans, including our NHS Five Year Joint Forward Plan and work is already underway. We will continue to engage with our communities over the coming months and years.

If you want to know more about the Integrated Care Partnership strategy please email helloworkingtogether@nhs.net