About our Group

Our motivation for this strategic commitment are clear, For NLAG, working with HUTH stabilises a number of small specialties ensuring they can still be provided as locally as possible on the South Bank. It also provides greater service capacity and allows us greater critical mass in key services to create room for flexibility and different options as NLAG tackles the issues it faces with having two relatively small acute hospitals. For HUTH, the partnership means more shared expertise and a more resilient workforce, especially for services and specialties which struggle to recruit. More collaborative working will also support sustained service delivery and continuity of care, closer to home, for patients living in Northern Lincolnshire who currently access specialist services such as oncology and cardiology through HUTH. The partnership will also provide certainty for a number of other specialist services run by HUTH which are reliant on referrals from across the entire Humber region for their long-term sustainability.

Our two trusts are working towards one vision – a vision to provide the best possible care together across the whole of the Humber region. We expect some of our services, whether they are clinical or non-clinical, will experience changes as a result of this work. More and more of them will join up through Group senior appointments, Group capital bids and Group business cases. That’s what putting each other first will mean in practice.

Our commitment to each other can be evidenced through:

The appointment of a Group Chair and a Group Chief Executive to work across both Trusts and provide joined up leadership and direction.

• The appointment of a number of executive and senior Group leads including a Chief Finance Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Medical Information Officer and Chief Nurse / AHP Information Officer.
• Collaboration and leadership of the Humber Acute Services Review (HASR) Programme.
• The development of an Interim Clinical Plan covering the ten vulnerable specialties: Haematology, Oncology, Neurology, Respiratory, Cardiology, ENT, Gastroenterology, Urology, Dermatology, Ophthalmology including:
• The setting up of an Executive-led Group Development Board to oversee increased levels of Group working and performance management and leadership.
• The development and agreement of a range of Committee’s in Common.
• Core service change for Urgent and Emergency Care, Maternity, Paediatrics, Neonatal and Planned Care.

Each Trust will, of course, still work separately where appropriate with other partners in areas like pathology and Women’s and Children’s services and, because the NHS is moving towards a more collaborative approach at Place (or Borough) level, we need to make sure we spend time developing relationships with our mental health and community partners as well as the emerging Primary Care Networks.

Alongside the HASR programme we are working with our partners in primary care, community care and local authorities to improve our pathways of care which our patients tell us are often fragmented, have high levels of duplication and, sometimes, poor communication between organisations. Only through collaboration will we deliver the services that we all believe our patients should receive. We need to focus on what we can deliver closer to or at home and what we need to centralise to make best use of scarce highly experienced and skilled clinical staff. As we do that we need to build on our communities and support the development of local workforce.

In addition, we will work closely with local government, further and higher education, the voluntary sector and the independent sector.   This collaborative approach to all we do will ensure that we:

• deliver the highest quality and sustainable services to our patients;
• play our part in delivering locally the national NHS agenda around health inequalities, population health management and delivering care closer to home;
• play our part as “Anchor Institutions”  within our localities maximising our role in delivering improved health and wellbeing, economic regeneration, local and regional innovation and increased levels of local employment;
• Build a network of commercial research and innovation partners
• maximise the skills and strength of our workforce:
  • Sharing resources
  • Developing local where possible
  • Improving training and development opportunities for life long learning for all staff;
  • Building capacity and capability
• Design and implement integrated pathways of care across community and primary care reducing reliance on hospital services and providing services closer to or at home for our patients;
• reduce inequalities of provision and access across our local communities;
• make increased use of technology to support prevention, self help, early intervention, remote diagnosis and treatment where appropriate;
• ensure that our infrastructure maximises the use of technology in service delivery including use of robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

The programme is actively designing solutions to support the implementation of new models of care and infrastructure across three distinct but inter-related programmes of work:

• Interim Clinical Plan (Programme One) – stabilising services within priority areas over the next couple of years to ensure they remain safe and effective, seeking to improve access and outcomes for patients.
• Core Hospital Services (Programme Two) – long-term strategy and design of future core hospital services, as part of broader plans to work more collaboratively with partners in primary, community and social care.
• Building Better Places (Programme Three) – working with a wide range of partners in support of a major capital investment bid to government to develop our hospital estate and deliver significant benefits to the local economy and population.

The work programmes are not standalone with significant interdependencies on:

• The implementation of new pathways of care across acute, primary and community services – “Left Shift” – delivering improved access and improved outcomes.
• Partnering with Local Authorities to ensure that our development plans maximise the benefit of investment in our local areas including “Town Centre” redevelopment and regeneration.
• Delivering substantive improvements on economic and health inequalities of our local populations.
• Gaining access to significant capital investment in our estate to allow us to implement our emerging pathways of care