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Cancer Alliance – Collaborative of Acute Providers

“The Collaborative of Acute Providers is working to ensure that the people of Humber and North Yorkshire have timely access to the same standard of acute care and are supported to achieve their best health.”

– Wendy Scott, the Managing Director of the Humber and North Yorkshire Collaboration of Acute Providers

Hello colleagues, I am Wendy Scott, the Managing Director of the Humber and North Yorkshire Collaboration of Acute Providers, more commonly referred to as CAP – we love an acronym in the NHS, don’t we!

The Collaboration of Acute Providers (CAP) is one of several provider collaboratives operating across the Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care System (Humber and North Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership) – others include the mental health, voluntary sector, primary care, and community provider collaboratives.

For those unfamiliar with the term, provider collaboratives are partnership arrangements involving two or more NHS trusts working at scale to benefit their populations. While providers have worked together for many years, the move to formalise this way of working gives providers the opportunity to combine resources and expertise to learn from each other and address the challenges they are facing.

The CAP consists of the four acute trusts in the our region – Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust; Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust; York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; and Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust.

We have been working collaboratively in this way for some time now and by working together we have agreed an elective and diagnostic recovery plan, optimising our joint capacity to ensure we manage our waiting list.

In terms of now and the future, we will use our collective expertise and resources to ensure that people have timely access to high quality care and are supported to achieve their best health.

We will do this by:

  • Being bold and ambitious in the standards of care we want for our patients and delivering those standards consistently.
  • Working together with our communities to tackle inequalities in patient outcomes, experience and access of services.
  • Investing and developing our workforce (existing and new staff), working with partners to ensure Humber and North Yorkshire is a great place to work.
  • Being a valuable partner to work with, across the health and care sector and voluntary, community and social care sector. 
  • Using our NHS resources effectively and efficiently to make sure people have access to the right treatment and care at the right time, delivered by the right staff.

It has been widely documented in the media that demand for NHS services has reached levels never seen before. We have made positive progress in recovering  services following on from the Covid Pandemic and we are exploring every opportunity to grow our capacity to meet future needs.

With that in mind members of the CAP are working together to:

  • Develop a strategic approach to clinical services focusing on vulnerable services and a strategic response to clinical networks and associated cross system working arrangements.
  • Deliver elective recovery (covering inpatient, diagnostics and cancer) to meet or exceed national benchmarks, standards and targets.
  • Deliver urgent care standards and requirements across providers and local systems to reduce variation and improve consistency of response.
  • Build capacity and capability in clinical support services to achieve appropriate infrastructure in place to delivery strategic clinical aims.
  • Establish and deliver appropriate corporate strategies to enhance integration and tackle variation including approaches to collective planning, rationalised and aligned estates/capital process and development of underpinning approaches in workforce.
  • Continue to build capacity and capability within and across HNY CAP to meet ongoing requirements.