Setting shared priorities
Following a series of events and workshops – involving staff, partners, leaders and patient representatives from across the north east and north Cumbria – the senior management team for our aspiring integrated care system (ICS) has agreed the following overarching priorities:
- Improving population health and preventing ill health
- Optimising health services – specifically through ensuring high quality standards across all services and delivering safe and sustainable care in the most appropriate setting
- Digital transformation – making the best use of technology, data and IT to ensuring efficient and effective services
- Workforce transformation – identify how doctors, nurses and other health and care professionals can work across organisations and sites, particularly hospital and community services; support and train staff to work differently; retain our existing workforce and jointly address recruitment challenges.
- Mental health – improve access to services and standards of care.
- Learning disabilities – improve quality of care, waiting times and outcomes for patients.
Senior leaders from clinical commissioning groups, NHS hospital trusts, NHS England and NHS Improvement are working to agree measurable objectives which the whole health system will work towards under the above themes. These objectives will need to be agreed and refined with local authorities and other partners to ensure a fully collaborative approach to delivery.
During the months of October and November 2019, a series of public engagement roadshows were held at various venues across the North East where there is high footfall such as NHS sites and marketplaces/supermarkets. Objectives included building NHS visibility, listening and understanding views to gauge opinion on areas of importance, talking positively about work happening in each area, and supporting key messages around areas such as use of services and flu, and delivery of health checks.
This was planned and designed to reflect the nature of individual ‘places’ in order to engage on local pieces of work, as well as the wider ambitions of the region’s NHS to build a health and care system which is fit for the future (an Integrated Care System).
The roadshow engagement provided a valuable opportunity for individuals to provide feedback as to what makes them proud of the NHS, what improvements they would like to see and what concerns them most about the future. A total of 1,327 responses to these questions were collected across the ICS region. The planned events in North Cumbria ICP were cancelled due to the implications for the ICP arising from Purdah restrictions. The report here provides a summary of the key findings for the ICS region, and for each ICP area.