Closing the gap: meeting our financial challenge

Our Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership is committed to working in a collaborative way to respond to the extreme financial challenges that face all of us. To meet these challenges head on we have set up a project group and programme. This programme of work is called ‘Closing the Gap’.

At the time of writing (January 2025) we have a planned deficit of around £30m across NHS partners in Bradford District and Craven. This deficit describes the difference between the money we receive (our revenue) and the money we spend. You will have noted that the gap has reduced from our starting position in December 2023, where it stood at around £80-£90m. There are many reasons for this including efforts to reduce our prescribing costs and reducing the number of people receiving care packages which are no longer suited to their needs or they are no longer eligible for. Further to this we have seen a reduction in the running costs for our place-based part of the NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB), difficult decisions being taken on not continuing any pilot or fixed-term projects and additional income that has come into our system.

If you have any ideas that could help us meet this challenge, please do get in touch by emailing actasone@nhs.net

Our approach

Our first steps have been to identify how and where we spend the overall system resource (£1.7 billion net across the NHS and council). Our next steps are to set out our population health needs and assess this against our activity, outcomes, and expenditure. We are really clear that we won’t be focusing on a solely cost cutting exercise and instead will carefully consider the wider impacts any decisions could have – both in terms of the health and wellbeing of the people we serve and our future budgets. By taking a more needs-based approach to the way we use the resources available to us, we can ensure that resources are directed to where they are most needed and that patients receive the care they require. We do however recognise that there will be undoubted impacts as we work through our programme as we will have to make difficult decisions.

Our business case appraisal panel

Over the coming months we expect to be making decisions that result in services changing. To help us ensure we make our decisions well, we have a business case appraisal panel that assesses stopping, pausing or continuing any new business plans as well as assessing the value of any non-recurrent projects. The business panel reflects the different sectors that make up our place-based partnership and considers the quality and equality impact of our plans.

The business case appraisal panel is an advisory group that makes recommendations to our partnership leadership executive. To help us ensure we have a fair and consistent process to making recommendations, the panel uses a prioritisation tool. This tool has a number of strict criteria that panel members have to assess each business case against. We are sharing our prioritisation criteria with you, as part of our ongoing efforts to be as open and transparent as possible on the work we are doing through the closing the gap programme.

We are involving all sectors in our programme

In particular we recognise and hear the concerns of our voluntary, community and social enterprise and independent care provider sectors. This is why we are ensuring that there is an equal voice for both sectors in our closing the gap programme. This will then ensure that we can test out different approaches and ideas, understanding what impact they will make now as well as any longer-term issues they may cause, before deciding on the options that have the least impacts – now and in the future.

We remain committed to our vision

Using our Act as One ethos, underpinned with a commitment to tackle inequalities, we remain determined in working towards our vision of people living ‘happy, healthy at home’. We will provide an update early in 2024 outlining the progress we have made and how you can provide insight and help make the difficult decisions that need to be made.

Briefings

We want to keep colleagues and partners updated on the progress we are making, we remain committed to providing regular briefings. You can use the links below to access the briefings issues to date.

Closing the gap update: meeting our financial challenge (January 2025)

This is the fourth update from our Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership’s closing the gap programme. Read this briefing to find out about our now updated expected deficit position and to find out more about the three stage approach we are currently working through. Read the closing the gap: meeting our financial challenge (update 4: 21 January 2025)

Closing the gap update: meeting our financial challenge (July 2024)

This is the third update from our Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership’s closing the gap programme. Read this briefing to find out our latest financial position and the work we’ve been doing to establish strong governance that reflects our wider partnership. Read closing the gap: meeting our financial challenge (update 3: 15 July 2024).

Closing the gap update: meeting our financial challenge (February 2024)

This is the second update from our Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership’s closing the gap programme. In this update, we want to share details of the progress we’re making as well as highlighting the timescales and risks we’re looking to mitigate. Read closing the gap: meeting our financial challenge (update 2: 12 February 2024).

Introduction to closing the gap: meeting our financial challenge (December 2023)

This is the introduction to the Bradford District and Craven Health and Care Partnership closing the gap programme. It sets out the scale of the challenge facing us and how we remain determined to use our Act as One ethos to involve all sectors in our health and care partnership. Read closing the gap: meeting our financial challenge December 2023 (pdf).