What we’re doing
Improving quality and productivity
NHS South Central has established a programme of work called “Shaping the Future” to support all organisations in the region to prepare for the significant financial pressures ahead. The aim is to reduce waste and inefficiency at the same time as increasing standards of care. At the heart of the programme is the principle that poor quality care wastes money.
The types of changes that are being planned are:
- Fewer hospital admissions and shorter lengths of stay in hospital
- Fewer out-patient visits
- Using more community-based health services rather than hospitals, wherever possible
- Caring for more people in their own home
- Supporting more people to care for themselves
- A greater focus on prevention; helping people to stay healthy.
As part of this work, in 2010/11 an estimated 3,500 posts will be removed from health organisations across the region (mostly from large hospitals), and there will be a reduction in hospital beds of between 300 and 400.
Alongside this, a number of other actions are being taken to make the region more efficient:
- More collaborative working between NHS organisations, local authorities and other partners, to improve the quality and cost effectiveness of services, ensuring that economies of scale can be achieved through cross-boundary working and/or partnership arrangements
- Radical redesign, based on clinical evidence, of the way services are provided
- Greater engagement with patients and the public so they are involved in, and understand, the new ways of working
- Greater engagement with staff, some of whom will need to work more flexibly across organisations and who may need to retrain to deliver new ways of working
- More adoption of evidence-based best practice – takes what works and uses it.
Implementing five clinical programmes
The SHA has five clinical programmes of work:
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