About us

Act as One describes our approach for our health and care partnership for Bradford district and Craven that serves a population of around 650,000 people with a health and care workforce of around 33,000 supported by over 5,000 voluntary and community sector organisations. The partnership is made up of NHS, local authority, Healthwatch, community and voluntary sector organisations and independent care providers working towards a vision of people living ‘happy, healthy at home’.

From 1 July 2022, our Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership Board will be responsible for arranging and delivering health and care services for Bradford district and Craven. Our ambitions will contribute to our efforts to tackle inequalities by taking a population health approach that is rooted in intelligence and knowledge of our communities.  Population health management uses historical and current data to understand what factors are driving poor outcomes in different population groups. 

We are home to the internationally recognised Born in Bradford, the world’s largest longitudinal study of its kind. We have a vast ‘city of research’ infrastructure which includes detailed health and wellbeing information and a connected routine dataset of health, social care and education data for people living in Bradford district and Craven. We host a range of initiatives to improve health working with the local authority, health, education, cultural and voluntary sector providers with work led by partners such as the Bradford Institute for Health Research, the University of Bradford and the Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research. 

Our most important partners are the individuals that make Bradford district and Craven a great place to live and work. Our ambition is to give people and communities more power to influence our decision making and create positive change. This is what we mean by “inverting the power to act”, one of our fundamental principles to ensure everyone can contribute to our vision.  

Our approach is based on our firmly held belief that we give power to our people and our communities so that they can help determine our decision making. However there are other times where we need to make decisions at scale either as a place (Bradford District and Craven) or as part of our wider system (West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership). 

We have strong foundations that we are building on, such as our existing Act as One system transformation programmes as well as the way we came together and continue to work together during the Covid pandemic.

We are proud to be active members of our award-winning West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership. We are one of five ‘places’ that make up the partnership alongside Calderdale, Kirklees Leeds and Wakefield. Across West Yorkshire our integrated care board will agree an annual plan to deliver the integrated care strategy (the refreshed five-year plan, please see page one and two). 

Most of the decisions about spending and services will then be made in local places in place-based partnerships.  This work will feed into the West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board.

To make sure that decisions are fair and clear, we will agree a set of rules that everyone will follow. These are our ‘governance standards’. These set out important things like:

• Holding meetings in public and publishing the papers in advance
• Making sure that the voices of people are heard by involving independent members and Healthwatch.

Across West Yorkshire, the Partnership supports 2.4 million people, including 315,000 unpaid carers, living in urban and rural areas; 570,000 are children and young people; 500,000 people live in areas ranked in the most deprived 10% of England; and 20% of people are from minority ethnic communities. Together we employ over 100,000 staff and work alongside thousands of volunteers.

We firmly believe that our communities and our colleagues have the most power to create health and should be equal partners when it comes to decision making. 

We want to unlock opportunities for better population health, working at the level of the neighbourhood and communities. Our population health approach, informed by insights from data, aims to prevent disease, protect people from threats to health, and support individuals and communities to improve their health and resilience.

To meet our ambitions and achieve our vision, we want to support communities to address important issues and help you take action on what matters to you. 

We will continue to ask people to share their experiences of health and care services as patients, as family members and as carers. But we want to go beyond this and understand how we can keep you healthy for longer, considering other things that impact your lives. So, we will work together to collect what we already know so that you are not frustrated by being asked the same question by different partners. We will continue to build relationships and connect to the work already happening in our communities. We will ask for help to get things right from communities and people with lived experience.

We want to create opportunities for people to be involved in our decision-making processes and do this in innovative ways. So we are being bold in our ambition to change the way we involve you (sometimes referred to as engagement) and have started a ‘redesigning engagement’ project. You can learn more about this and join the conversations on our new online involvement space.

We helped develop the involvement principles for the West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership and will apply these to everything we do in Bradford District and Craven.

• Informed by data 
• Clear, simple, and meaningful
• Consistent and fair
• Open, honest, and transparent
• Targeted
• Timely
• Two-way
• Value for money