Providing Sustainable Children's Surgery across South Yorkshire, Mid Yorkshire and North Derbyshire

The Working Together Programme (WTP) is a collaboration of commissioners and providers that have made a commitment to collaborate to develop a strategy to sustain local healthcare. By working in this way the overall programme aspires to meet the needs of a changing population, maximising productivity across all services, ensuring that services are fit for the future, meeting increased patient expectations and further improving patient care, whilst operating within a challenging financial environment.

The Commissioner Working Together partnership covers the eight Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) in South and Mid Yorkshire, Bassetlaw and North Derbyshire, along with NHS England (Yorkshire and Humber). The commissioners are working jointly with the seven acute trusts of the Provider Working Together partnership (Barnsley, Chesterfield, Doncaster and Bassetlaw, Mid Yorkshire, Rotherham, Sheffield Children’s and Sheffield Teaching) on a number of common key areas. One of these is Children’s Surgery and Anaesthesia Services.

The programme has undertaken a baseline review of the surgical services provided for children across this footprint, and the review has identified the need for a change within the current provision to enable sustainable services to be commissioned that are fit for the population’s needs in the future.

Alongside the review the programme has already worked on the development of best practice guidance and the development of a high level best practice service specification that has been produced with support from the Strategic Clinical Network in Yorkshire and Humber, which also has a Yorkshire and Humber wide work programme in this area.

Commissioners Working Together would like to invite interested providers to a briefing session on the work of the programme to date, and to express an interest and their capability to deliver provision as set out in the service specification. The session will include:

• An outline of the strategic case for change

• An outline of the service specification and options for models for the future

• Information on the baseline assessment of current provision

• The questions we are asking providers to respond to

• The next stages we are planning within the programme of work and the timeframes

The briefing session will be taken place on 8 December, 1-2pm at NHS Sheffield CCG headquarters 722 Prince of Wales Road, Sheffield S9 4EU.

This session is for providers who would like more information about the programme of work and that would potentially like to express an interest in providing these services in the future should there be a need for any re-commissioning or new procurement of any part of the provision in the future.

To register your place and interest please email kate.woods@nhs.net