Plymouth NHS Hospitals Trust ready to face the future

Plymouth NHS Hospitals Trust has set out its future vision and plans to address failures and make improvements.

The Trust has faced scrutiny over a number of recent failures to meet clinical targets and standards in patient care.

The Trust's board met on Friday (7 June) to review both positive and negative areas of its performance over the past 12 months and launch its future clinical strategy. Chief Executive, Ann James was present to lead the latter.

The Trust failed to meet the 4 hour target on A&E waiting times overall last year and is awaiting a report following an investigation by the Care Quality Commission into a number of serious and avoidable patient safety errors known as 'never events'.

In another recent high profile failure, the Trust missed an annual government target for cancer care. The target stipulates that an annual 85% of patients referred by their GP for suspected cancer should begin treatment within 62 days. However, although the Trust says that the most serious cases were dealt with quickly, Derriford Hospital achieved only an 81% overall rate in the past year.

Meanwhile with the NHS under considerable pressure nationally, the Trust is working to address concerns over their financial position.

The Trust told The Plymouth Daily: "We have developed our strategy which sets out the vision for our hospital Trust and we will use this to guide our recovery. The challenges we face, like all health care providers will be to deliver demonstrably better care, to meet the growing expectations of our patients when our finances are shrinking.

"We know that despite our challenges, we have many top class services delivered by truly committed staff and we will develop our financial recovery plan not by imposing plans from the top but by working bottom-up, listening to our staff and taking the right actions.

"To support us in this journey we have already reorganised our services into service lines which are led by doctors, nurses and clinical specialists and supported by managers. Our approach is to work with and through our service lines ensuring that every one of our services are offering the highest quality care possible as well as demonstrating their efficiency through a systematic approach to improvement including benchmarking what they provide against other UK providers.

"Facing the challenge and working to address it, means we can secure our future. We are a large hospital Trust and all of the conditions are right for us to be a high performing sustainable provider. We absolutely expect to be in a position to make an FT (Foundation Trust) application by the end of 2015/16. We are working with the Trust Development Authority and our commissioners to that end to ensure we have long-term sustainable plans."

Addressing the missed A&E target, the Trust told us:

"This winter the local health system has been under considerable pressure, which has been felt particularly acutely within the Emergency Department.

"The Trust has received a very high level of general admissions to medicine compared to last year. In addition, there has been a higher than expected number of ambulance transfers into our Emergency Department.

"This additional patient need has stretched services across the local health community but it is clear that this increase represents a genuine need for hospital services, rather than patients who could and should have been managed elsewhere.

"Between April 2012 and January 2013 Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust was in the top half of performing Trusts against the national A&E four hour targets."