HFRS stated that the emergency services ‘from the four corners of Yorkshire and the Humber’, alongside NHS England and Public Health England, have pledged to ‘work even closer together for the benefit of the health and wellbeing of people across the region’. With services sharing a ‘long history of effective collaborative working and the signing of a consensus statement’ to extend the partnership, this is ‘the first regional agreement to follow a similar national agreement’.
The aim is that, with ‘demand for health and social care rising’, the focus would be for services to ‘use their joint intelligence and skills to support communities’ when problems are identified. This would include ‘greater sharing and development of referral pathways into key services, and services involved include: Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust; North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service; North Yorkshire Police; HFRS; Humberside Police; South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service; South Yorkshire Police; West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service; and West Yorkshire Police.
By tackling risks ‘jointly and more effectively’, the main thrust of the project is to ‘improve the quality of life for individuals and ultimately reduce demand on the busy emergency services’. Projects include a Safe and Well conference held this month to look at improving ‘multi agency offering to vulnerable people in the community’, police and fire volunteering schemes, and the FIRST falls team and emergency medical response elements undertaken by HFRS.
In turn, joint memorandums of understanding have been implemented for missing persons cases between fire and police, as well as for use of fire investigation dogs for both fire and police crime scene investigations. Finally, fire and police staff are part of the Make Every Contact Count (MECC) community improvement network, using this to ‘upskill and train staff in related subject areas’.
Chris Blacksell, chief fire officer of HFRS, said he was ‘keen to build upon much of the work already done in this area’, adding: ‘We are excited to be involved in many collaborative approaches for improving the services that our organisations deliver to the community. The examples discussed today are proving successful across a range of interventions to support communities and we are developing collaboration to further contribute to a combined approach to provide positive outcomes for the safety, health and wellbeing of people across the Humberside region.’