The WYICB, which covers Bradford and neighbouring districts, came into being in July 2022 and is responsible for planning and commissioning local health and care services, taking the functions of the previous NHS West Yorkshire Clinical Commissioning Group.
On Thursday, August 7, Vicky Dutchburn, Interim Place Lead at the Kirklees Health and Care Partnership, gave an update on upcoming changes to the ICB at a meeting of Kirklees Council’s Health and Wellbeing Board. She explained that in March, ICBs were notified that the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England, was going to be reducing its workforce by 50 per cent.
She said: “What wasn’t abundantly clear to everybody, the public, etc., within that, it also included the ICBs, places and at West Yorkshire, at regional level. And we were given, at that time, a deadline to be able to do that by Quarter Three (Q3), this financial year. So it was going to be at a very fast, rapid pace to reduce our workforce by 50 per cent, and that wasn’t just the head count, it was the running costs that we had to be able to achieve.”
At the moment, there are around 1,600 people working for the ICB across the whole of West Yorkshire. When cuts are made, Ms Dutchburn said the ICB would be going down to around 600 plus staff, and with some services set to transition out of the ICB to other providers, she said the organisation could end up consisting of between 300 and 340 staff members.
She outlined the proposed landscape for the health and care system going forward which was displayed as a pyramid consisting of national teams at the top, then regional teams, ICBs, followed by providers which are all working to different timescales for making cuts. For example, she said that changes in the national and regional teams aren’t due until 2027.
The WYICB’s original plan was to go out to consultation in July so redundancies could be made by Q3. However, Ms Dutchburn said this had not been achievable due to things outside of the WYICB’s control. It is currently anticipating consultation in September, though a “big question mark” hangs over that, she said, as national and regional services had not yet designed their blueprints.
Moving forward the ICB’s main emphasis will be strategic commissioning, Ms Dutchburn explained, with a lot of its current functions where services are delivered to be moved elsewhere or stop.
She said: “As I’ve said, our intention is that we will be going out to consult on September 3, and that’s the plan that we’ve put in and that’s what we’re telling staff, though we have as of last week told them there is a potential that we might not.
“That is very unsettling for staff because staff have been working all year thinking this is going to happen at a rapid pace and getting their heads around the fact that 50 per cent of our work force is going to be going is hard enough without being told ‘we’re moving the dates, we’re moving the dates. And trying to say to staff that’s not us at West Yorkshire, it’s not us at Kirklees that have done that, it is a national position.”