West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership
West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership
West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership (WY HCP) is an integrated care system (ICS). Integrated care systems 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.
This information is also available as an infographic, ‘ICS purpose’ on the Partnership’s website.
The West Yorkshire ICS employs 140,000 people supporting and caring for a population of 2.4 million people living in urban and rural areas. 770,000 are children and young people. 530,000 people live in areas ranked in the most deprived 10% of England. 20% of people are from minority ethnic communities and an estimated 400,000 are unpaid carers.
We are very proud to have won the Health Service Journal Award for Integrated Care System of the Year in 2021 and 2022.
Working arrangements are co-produced by partner organisations, including NHS and community providers, commissioners, hospices, local authorities, the VCSE sector, Healthwatch and communities.
Our Partnership Board is chaired by Councillor Tim Swift of Calderdale Council on behalf of our Partnership, and brings partners together, supported by the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA), and Local Resilience Forum. This approach is supported by strong provider organisations, including West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT), the Mental Health, Learning Disabilities and Autism Collaborative (MHLDA), the Community Care Collaborative and Hospice Collaborative.
We follow the principle of subsidiarity which means that the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership performs only those tasks that cannot be performed at a more local level. This approach means that most of the work happens at Place level (Bradford District and Craven, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds, and Wakefield District).
Our vision
We have worked together to develop a shared vision for health and care services across West Yorkshire. All proposals, both as partner organisations and at an Integrated Care System level should be supportive of the delivery of this vision.
Involvement
We are committed to meaningful conversations with people and value highly the feedback that people share with us. Effective public involvement, particularly with those with lived experience and who are seldom heard, ensures that we make the right decisions together about our health and care services. People are involved in our plans from the start. Our approach builds on local insight and described in our communications and engagement plan, which enables us to involve people across the whole area from the start as part of our involvement framework.
Race equality (more than words)
Our goal is to put people at the heart of everything we do so that together, we meet the diverse needs of all communities. People from minority ethnic communities continue to face health inequalities, discrimination in the workplace and are more likely to develop and die because of serious diseases, for example COVID-19.
We commissioned a review in 2020 into the impact of COVID-19 on minority ethnic communities and colleagues. Recommendations were published in a report, the delivery of which is overseen by our Partnership Board. A follow up review to this important work has been published (February 2025) which includes areas of success and what more we need to do.
The review includes our award winning Fellowship leadership programme, which helps us ensure that the voices of ethnic minority colleagues inform our work. Members have blogged about the training here.