Visit to West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts

Our chief executive Daniel Elkeles recently made the visit to the West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT), made up of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust, Airedale NHS Foundation Trust, Mid Yorkshire Teaching NHS Trust and Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Daniel said: "WYAAT has lots to be proud of in the joint work that it has collectively achieved for the 2.7m people it serves.

"The trusts have been working together since 2016 and are in the process of taking a case for change on their future collaboration work programme to each of their boards. Their current priorities include: 

🔵 Establishing a single pharmacy aseptic hub to produce ready-to-administer medicines for distribution to hospitals.
🔵 Implementing single radiology and pathology IT systems to enable collaborative ways of working, taking their existing procurement collaboration much further.
🔵 Maximising the utilisation of their community diagnostic centres.
🔵 Sharing capacity to equalise planned care waiting times.
🔵 Starting work on networking of services with capacity and workforce constraints such as neurology.

"My highlight was visiting the new Centre for Laboratory Medicine (CfLM), which will become the main hub for microbiology testing across the pathology network, as well as a specialist reference centre for a number of disciplines.

"The CfLM is a vast building which proudly hosts the longest pathology track (the machinery that moves each blood sample tube through all the different laboratory testing modules) in North-Western Europe at 76m in length! The lab is already processing 13,000 samples a day, which will increase further as immunology and virology transfer over in the coming weeks. 

"In addition to state-of-the-art technology, improvements made to the working environment for the biomedical scientists has been transformational. Gone are the days of being in poky corners of buildings – this building allows all the teams to work together with high quality education and welfare facilities.

"It means that attracting the next generation of biomedical scientists and running apprenticeships has become considerably easier. It's already hosting school visits. Thank you to Brendan, Mel, Brent, Foluke, Jonathan and Mike from Pathology for a great visit."