• The lead provider collaboratives have been able to deliver reductions or eliminate out of area placements. Savings made by the adult eating disorder provider collaborative, achieved through removing all out-of-area placements and a reduction in beds, has been invested in specialist community provision to the whole of West Yorkshire.
  • The complex rehabilitation service has been successful in improving equity and has helped more people into supported living settings and increased independence.
  • The staff mental health and wellbeing hub, which offers tiered mental health support, set up the programme team during the pandemic. It is now finalising a lead provider model, in which the lead provider hosts a bank of therapists available to support staff. The hub also works across teams involved in critical incidents, separate from occupational health. Due to its success, the initiative has been retained after the centralised NHS England funding came to an end at the start of 2023.
  • There's been some really positive work done in partnership with the acute provider collaborative, West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT) to identify and prioritise people with learning disabilities on elective care waiting lists and to consider support for people in the acute setting with mental health needs. Learning from this approach is now being applied to support other potentially vulnerable groups.
  • Night Owls, a confidential support line for children and young people in crisis, is an essential service that has been successful due to the collaborative approach taken in its development. The programme was able to fund the pilot and has supported the roll out across all five Places in West Yorkshire. It is also a great example of bringing the right people together hosted by one trust with a voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisation as the lead provider.
  • The collaborative launched a recruitment campaign for the mental health, learning disabilities and autism (MHLDA) workforce to support workforce challenges, as well as attracting people form diverse backgrounds into the workforce. The campaign saw real success by using the collaborative's 'do once' approach. Review of retention rates of those recruited through the campaign will be carried out to evaluate its success.
  • There are also lots of less tangible examples of cultural change and of people sharing ideas, influencing each other and learning across the system.
  • It can be difficult at this early stage to demonstrate improvement across all performance measures in the context of ever increasing demand. However, collaborative members highlight a wide range of less tangible examples of cultural change and of people sharing ideas, influencing each other and learning across the system which will contribute to improvement over time.