About us | West Yorkshire ICB

We are proud of what we have achieved as a Health and Care Partnership since our establishment in 2016, and as an Integrated Care Board within that Partnership since July 2022. We are looking to appoint a Chair who can lead the Board through a period of transition for the ICB and Partnership.

Our aim is to build on the work we have achieved and to deliver on our Integrated Care Strategy and Joint Forward Plan to provide the best health and care possible for everyone living across the area.

In West Yorkshire we have four aims:

To reduce health inequalities
Manage unwarranted variations in care
Secure the wider benefits of investing in health and care
Use our collective resources wisely

To deliver these aims requires a balancing of priorities and significant engagement with a range of partners. This includes people who access care and communities, as well as groups of senior executives, non-executive and elected leaders in the NHS, local authorities, voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector (VCSE), hospices, businesses, regulators, universities, and further education colleges.

Diversity in Leadership

We are committed to improving the diversity of our leadership as demonstrated in our West Yorkshire review report and our recently published equity and fairness strategy – Power of one, power of many – by tackling health inequalities for minority ethnic communities and colleagues, understanding impact, reducing inequalities and supporting recovery so that it is more representative of the people we serve.

Integrated Care Systems

Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) are partnerships of health and care organisations that come together to plan and deliver joined-up services improving the health of people who live and work in the area.

ICBs in England have four core objectives that broadly mirror those of the wider Partnership. These are to:

Improve health outcomes and reduce inequalities in health
Ensure consistently high-quality care
Drive improved productivity
Improve social and economic impact

Strategic shifts

In support of these four objectives, the Government has set out three strategic shifts for the NHS:

Treatment to prevention: through proactive community and public health initiatives, working closely with local authorities, communities and individuals.
Hospital to community: Moving care closer to home by building more joined-up, person-centred care in local neighbourhoods, reducing reliance on acute care.
Analogue to digital: Harnessing technology and data to transform care delivery and improve quality of care.

These need to be considered in the context of the draft Model ICB Blueprint and the draft Model Region Blueprint; Fit for the Future (the 10 Year Plan for the NHS); the three year planning guidance for the NHS and wider public sector reforms. Together, these set out the crucial role ICBs will play in delivering the three shifts and the wider 10-year plan, with partners.

You can find out more about our leadership journey here.

Our work

Our work is driven by 10 big ambitions, set out in our co-produced five-year integrated care strategy and the National Targets set out in the 10 Year Plan and associated guidance. Each is measured through metrics relating to health and wider determinants.

Ambitions include increasing the years of life that people live in good health (with metrics linked to variation in prescribing practices for the leading causes of premature mortality), addressing health inequality gaps for children living in the poorest households, strengthening local economic growth, reducing anti-microbial resistant infections, and creating a healthier living environment and reducing suicide rates. For example, our Check in with Your Mate campaign aims to work with people across West Yorkshire so we are all aware of the warning signs and able to support people to build resilience – and importantly prevent them from taking their life.

Working at scale allows us to reach more people. For example, our Learning Disabilities Challenge aims to help more than 200,000 people in West Yorkshire. The Staff Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub supports over 100,000 sector colleagues, providing staff with one-to-one therapy and wellbeing support. Another example is seen in our approach across six acute hospitals (WYAAT) which seeks solutions to reduce patient waiting lists, such as transferring patients between each trust (including the independent sector) so people receive treatment earlier.

Social care and prevention

Our councils lead on social care, sharing best practice on preventing ill health, social prescribing, community development, self-help, extra care, supported housing, new models of recruitment and integrated service delivery with the NHS.

Developing a coproduced ‘trauma informed’ approach to our work, we’re also working with the West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit, communities, police, prison services and housing, to help better support people to lead a long, healthy life free from impact of trauma. Support from compassionate services will reduce pressure on people and our wider system.

In 2025-26, West Yorkshire has been selected as part of a national drive to help improve the health of the population and increase economic growth by providing support to reduce the number of people who cannot work because of ill health.

Investment in our future

In West Yorkshire alone, there are an estimated 101,000 people who are unable to work because of one or more health conditions. As one of eight inactivity trailblazer sites, West Yorkshire has received £20 million investment, enabling us to work together to help reduce the number of people who are economically inactive, which will enable us to:

Further develop and expand our social care and NHS workforce
Ensure continued focus on prevention and early intervention activity
Expand and diversify employment support and employer liaison

In numbers

The Partnership has a memorandum of understanding with the VCSE sector, backed by investment and strong ties into the way the Partnership operates. Investment in the sector, with a focus on helping sustainability and tackling health inequalities, goes beyond the range of service provision and grant funding arrangements in our Places. In 2023, our West Yorkshire VCSE sector had:

13,930 organisations (registered and unregistered)
31,767 full time equivalent employees delivering 52.4 million working hours a year 132,214 volunteers giving at least 9.5 million hours of work valued at between £94 million and £132 million a year
an economic value of £1.4 billon and estimated value of £5.18 billion when considering added and social value

You can see more examples of the positive difference our work is making here.

Our Strategy and plans will be revised in line with national timescales over the coming 6 months.