What are our priorities and how are we doing
What are our priorities and how are we doing
Annual Reports
Each year the Trust publishes an Annual Report. The Trust was established on 1 July 2011 with the first annual report produced in the summer of 2012 (for 2011/12). This and subsequent publications may be found on our Annual reports and accounts page.
Annual Business Plan
The Trust's Annual Plan can be found on our designated Trust plans page.
Targets, Aims and Objectives
The Trust’s objectives outline the key areas the Trust will focus on in the coming years in order to achieve its vision, and are based on national and local priorities, developed by the Trust Board with input from local stakeholders. Our objectives are set out in our Objectives document:
Information about the Trust’s targets, aims and objectives and information regarding any major project can be found within the Board papers which are published on the Trust’s website, with the Integrated Dashboard included in the Performance Report.
Our Vision
Our vision is outlined fully on our Vision, objectives and values page.
Strategic Direction document (5 year plan)
The Trust has worked up its strategy, both with the Trust Board and with staff and partners, since becoming an NHS Community Trust on 1 July 2011. This is available to view/download on our Trust plans page.
The Trust held a special stakeholder event on 16th November 2011 to help shape and develop the Trust’s strategy. This large scale meeting brought together nearly a hundred people from a wide range of organisations – commissioners, partners, local patients’ groups, social care, local authorities, the voluntary sector, other providers and other public sector organisations along with Trust staff, managers and Board members. Please see the attached report from the Strategy Planning Event below.
Performance against targets (KPI)/performance framework
All KPI information is included as part of the bi-monthly Board meetings. This information is available on our Board papers page.
As mentioned in the "Targets, Aims and Objectives" section above, the Trust is developing its dashboard to assist the reporting process. The reporting takes account of the DoH NHS Performance Framework, Strategic Health Authority (SHA) Framework and our commissioner requirements against their minimum standards, with the commissioner requirements built into the contracts in a way to support and deliver high quality services for their local community.
The Trust is developing a Performance Strategy which will be published on the website. The purpose of this strategy is to set out the strategic direction of travel for the performance agenda in Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust, setting a clear direction of travel and empowering staff to understand the significance of their role.
Clinical governance
At the heart of the Trust’s work is a framework called “clinical governance” which aims to make sure that we continually develop the quality of service we deliver to patients and service users by enabling the Trust to monitor and improve the quality of service that we provide. Clinical Governance looks at areas such as risk, clinical audit, records management, research and learning from experience.
The Trust has a Quality and Safety Committee which ensures that Clinical Governance processes take place. We produce a Quality Account every year that looks back on the work that we have done over the previous year and the plans we have to improve quality over the coming year.
Our current list of quality accounts can be found on our Quality care page.
Care Quality Commission (CQC) Compliance
The CQC make sure hospitals and all other care services in England provide people with safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care, and they encourage services to make improvements.
Audit reports
The Clinical Audit Team within the Trust provides the resources for staff to undertake clinical audit projects - comparing what actually happens within the Trust against measurable criteria. How we do this is outlined in our Clinical Audit Policy. The Audit Team will provide an annual report to the Trust on how much audit work has gone on over the year and what changes have been proposed and made as a result.
This department also reviews information which comes from NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence), and ensures that the clinical staff in the Trust are aware of the information and are taking it into account in their practice. In this way, we ensure that best practice from all over the country is incorporated into the way we work.
Service User Surveys
Shropshire Community Health NHS Trust is always keen to hear the views of patients and the public who use any of our services. We carry out many service user surveys as part of our clinical governance work and use the results of these to inform the way we provide care.
Some services conduct and provide their own information and user surveys; you can see the full list of services we provide on our main A-Z of services page.
Patient Opinion
Background
Patient Opinion was founded by Paul Hodgkin, a GP in Sheffield in 2005 and since then has grown to be the UK's independent non-profit feedback platform for health services. The initial phase of Patient Opinion was funded by the Department of Health and South Yorkshire Strategic Health Authority. Since 2006, Patient Opinion has been funded through subscriptions and sales to trusts, commissioners and others. Patient Opinion stories are shared and may appear on other websites including NHS Choices, patient organisations and Local Information Networks (LINks)/Health Watch. Their income is generated from health service organisations that choose to subscribe to Patient Opinion.
Process
Patient Opinion offers a subscription service, however, to increase its membership from 01 July 2011 they have offered all NHS organisations to register for basic use of Patient Opinion for free until July 2012. Once registered, the process is as follows:
- Patients can share their stories with Patient Opinion either online, telephone (0845 number) or a free leaflet that is provided by them
- Patient Opinion will send story to the nominated member/s of staff in the Trust via an email alert when a posting relevant to our subscription is published. This email will have a link, which can be clicked to view the story on the Patient Opinion website
- The Trust will then be able to send their response and high-light any changes that have resulted as an outcome. They will then publish it on their site and a notification by email will be sent to the Trust
Present Status
Shropshire Community Trust is now a registered member and is geared towards improving patient experience by using different ways of capturing patient feedback. The Trust is committed to having meaningful conversations with patients and service-users both through our internal systems which are already in place (e.g. PALS/Complaints/CQUIN surveys and other internal patient feed-back) together with listening to patient stories on Patient Opinion and trying to improve services as a direct result of those feed-back. A Trust-wide workshop on Patient Opinion was recently organised for staff which had a very good attendance from all services. The Trust will now pilot this through some of our services.
Next Steps
We will be doing some promotional campaigns to create awareness with our patients and offer them the choice to register their feed-back/concerns/compliments either through our existing internal system (PALS/Complaints) that is already in place and well established or through independent on-line feedback via Patient Opinion. Further information on Patient Opinion can be accessed via: www.patientopinion.org.uk (external site).