Chief Executive Stakeholder newsletter – April 2024 

 

Hello all,  

In April we focused a lot on our budgets and plans for 2024/25, reflected on our maternity improvement journey – six months on from the CQC inspection, and launched a new multidisciplinary forum to support colleagues to learn and improve the way we work by sharing best practice every two weeks.

Our services  

Planning for 2024/25

Like other NHS Trusts the Trust are now planning for what we can deliver in the year ahead - not only financially - but in other areas that will help us to meet the performance targets, clinical priorities and system-wide plans set out by NHS England in the annual planning guidance - which was published at the end of March. The guidance is primarily about improving safety and quality for our patients and some of its headline targets for this year include:

  • 78% of patients attending ED should be admitted, transferred, or discharged within 4-hours.
  • Patients should be seen within 65 weeks for elective procedures.
  • 77% of patients should be diagnosed within 28-days to meet the cancer Faster Diagnosis Standard by March 2025.

The guidance also sets out that the NHS needs to work to become more financially sustainable over the next few years. This means looking at a more robust cost improvement plan and increasing our productivity, as well as ways we can work more closely with our NHS partners to share our resources and deliver for our patients. This includes looking at how we can make our Provider Collaboratives – which are designed to support Trusts to work better together - to make the best use of the reducing resources they will have available for their shared local communities in the coming years. Partnership work will be a key part of this.

Maternity CQC update

Six months on from the CQC’s inspection of the Trust’s maternity services, we have made significant progress on our improvement action plan – with 75% of actions either completed or on-track for completion. This includes a substantial recruitment drive and the launch of ‘the big four’ - infection control, medicines management, equipment checking, mandatory training – as key improvement areas we will focus on embedding into all that we do. There has also been more work on patient experience – increasing understanding of post-natal care plans and significantly improving one-to-one labour care. While we of course have more to do, our maternity team and the new leadership have made substantial progress to strengthen what better patient care really means in practice.

Our partners  

Improving Lives Together

Improving Lives Together is the new strategy published by our ICS partners at NHS Sussex and signals evolution in the ICS’s commissioning role and the role providers play in the established Committee In Common. Going forward the Committee will lead the clinical and financial transformation of the NHS in Sussex by delivering new, integrated and affordable models of care over the next five years that ensure financial sustainability as well as clinical transformation. We will be talking more about this new strategy during our Board meeting later this week.

SASH+

Last month we hosted visitors from organisations across the UK to come and hear about our SASH+ journey, with members of staff sharing their experience of the impact that SASH+ has had in their areas of work – including the work done to speed up discharge and reduce length of stay, as well as to better utilise theatre space to see more patients awaiting elective care. It is always a privilege to host external visitors who are genuinely interested in our work, and hopefully by sharing our journey with them we can support more NHS Trust’s to start their own continuous improvement journey – which will mean more positive changes for patients and staff in more areas of the NHS.

Trust news  

World Parkinson’s Day

Thursday 11 April was World Parkinson’s Day, which this year is themed around living well with Parkinsons. Parkinson's is the fastest growing neurological condition in the world, and at SASH every year we take time to raise awareness of how it affects people and how healthcare professionals can provide the best care and support – including delivering Time Critical medication, which can significantly impact the symptoms of those living with the disease. We often have between 10 – 15 inpatients with Parkinson’s Disease at a time, so it’s vital we get this right. As part of her work with NHS Professionals living with Parkinsons, Clare Addison, our Lead Nurse for Adult Safeguarding at SASH, also took part in a video for social media on the benefits of exercise in supporting people to live well with Parkinsons - which we shared on our social media platforms. As in previous years, we also lit up the boiler house and chimney at East Surrey Hospital in blue to show our commitment in line with the national campaign.   

New multidisciplinary forum

This month, Tina Hetherington, our Chief Nurse launched a new fortnightly multidisciplinary forum called ‘Our Care Counts’ to help us review our performance as a Trust in key areas of care. The forum will discuss learning and share opportunities to improve how care is delivered to our patients - making sure we are always improving the way we work - supporting both our Trust’s SASH+ ethos and all those who need and use our services. 

Visitor car park resurfacing

Last month we undertook some essential resurfacing works in the visitor car park at East Surrey Hospital to help improve access and to patients and visitors. The works, which started ahead of Easter weekend were completed the following week. You can find out more about this work here.