Woodsley and Holt Park Local Care Partnership has a large footprint over north Leeds: all the way from Woodhouse, Little London, Burley, Hyde Park, Headingley and Kirkstall, through to Horsforth, Holt Park, and Cookridge.
Partners include local GPs, community health services, mental health, adult social care, Active Leeds, local councillors, pharmacists, third sector organisations and community groups. GPs involved in our partnership include:
- Fieldhead Surgery
- High Field Surgery
- Ireland Wood & Horsforth Medical Practice
- Abbey Grange Medical Practice
- Burley Park Medical Centre
- Burton Croft Surgery
- Craven Road Medical Centre
- Hyde Park Surgery
- Kirkstall Lane Medical Centre
- Laurel Bank Surgery
- Vesper Road Surgery
If you provide health and wellbeing support in our area, you are very welcome to come along, share what you do and look at how we can work with one another to support people in our local area.
Current priorities
As a partnership, we want to be responsive to what is going on in local people’s lives and how this impacts their health. We explore a range of topics in our meetings, learning from each other and building relationships. This has been vital to supporting people over the pandemic and in the cost of living crisis.
The partnership is currently actively working on opportunities to offer health services from community settings and on developing a Digital Health Hub Network.
Offering health services from community settings
Third Sector partners in this LCP are forming strong relationships with health partners and exploring how to offer health services from community buildings. This approach has a number of advantages and a number of challenges. Offering support in community settings means that health partners can engage people who may be reluctant to attend health appointments in surgeries and clinics. We can capture people through opportunistic health checks who may not prioritise routine health checks. It can also mean that people who will attend health appointments make new connections in community buildings that they may otherwise not have visited.
The challenge is that some health services need designated clinical space and community venues may not offer this within their estate. The primary care network offer some aspects of support from community buildings, including establishing clinical space in the Cardigan Centre. Leeds Community Healthcare NHS Trust are also offering support from OPAL Neighbourhood Network.
We have used community grant funding to support warm spaces across the Local Care Partnership and the Primary Care Network are connecting their staff to these spaces to pilot pop up health checks and support.
Digital Health Hub Network
Healthwatch Leeds’ report on ‘Digitising Leeds: Risks and opportunities for reducing health inequalities in Leeds’ highlighted the inequalities certain communities may face when accessing digitised health and care services. COVID helped to identify the benefits of going digital and has accelerated the process of health and care services becoming more digitised. Despite its benefits, this has presented some issues for those who do not have access to digital equipment or have low digital skills and motivation.
South Leeds LCP, due to its diverse demographic, was identified as an area of great potential to the scope and design interventions for digitising health services. They worked with 100% Digital Leeds to create a digital health hub network. You can find out more about Digital Health Hubs here – Digital Health Hubs – 100% Digital Leeds (digitalinclusionleeds.com)
This model proved successful and we are now rolling the model out across Local Care Partnerships. Woodsley and Holt Park LCP were part of the first wave of the rollout. They identified that they needed a digital inclusion worker who could work across partner organisations to help build the network and provide specialist support. The partnership is looking to appoint to this new role and continue to develop a model of digital inclusion that will work for the local population.
How to get involved
We are keen to include more partners across the patch, in particular those who can support our current priorities and community groups. If you would like more information or to join us, please contact [email protected].