Norfolk and Waveney ICS has shared an update on the progress made around aims set out in the ICS’s five-year Joint Forward Plan, including how data is being used to measure progress and completion of ambitions.
The ICS has recently published its population health management strategy and a health inequalities strategy, with a focus on prevention, improving health outcomes, reducing health inequalities and tackling wider determinants. Here, the ICS notes using “linked-data from many sources to identify reversible risk and opportunities to implement evidence-based interventions to reduce unwarranted variation”. It adds the focus to transition and scale successful pilot projects and encourage innovation.
On improving urgent and emergency care, further progress is to be made to improve emergency ambulance response times, expand virtual ward services, reducing length-of-stay rates in hospitals and “effectively” utilising capacity across all health system partners. Data measures here include achieving a 30-minute mean response time for emergency ambulances, achieving 368 virtual ward beds, achieving or exceeding the national target to reduce hospital occupancy to 92 percent or less, and reducing waiting times for patients, with particular focus on earlier diagnoses of cancer.
For transforming mental health services, the plan features an aim to increase awareness of mental health, including supporting self reporting, and enabling the population to build skills and knowledge to support wellbeing, along with delivering a refreshed suicide prevention strategy and working more widely on early intervention and prevention for people of all ages. The ICS will be measuring the completion of this aim by analysing data provided by self-reporting, namely the number of people reporting high anxiety, low happiness and feelings of low worth. The rates of suicide and reported self-harm will also be measured across the system.
Another ambition is to “see the whole person for who they are, developing pathways that support engagement, treatment and promote recovery for people living with multiple and complex needs”, particularly complex emotional needs. This aim has also been met; the ICS measured completion by the training of 300 additional members of staff per year in “specific approaches” in this area, although this figure was exceeded by a further 80 members of staff receiving training. Success was also measured by an increase in the number of service users accessing a psychologically-informed intervention outside of NHS talking therapies and secondary care.
Also around mental healthcare, the ICS notes the completion of the ambition to “mobilise an adult mental health collaborate and a children and young people’s collaborative so that partners work as one to deliver better health outcomes”. Data used to measure progress in this area has included qualitative feedback from people, families and professionals before and after implemented changes.
For primary care, the update notes the focus on operational primary care resilience, the vision to provide services closer to local populations and to support the primary care workforce.
A key ambition in the plan was to implement digital technology to enable elective recovery; here, progress has been mapped by measuring how many patients have been offered mutual aid, how many patients chose a different hospital, and how many patients chose to wait at their preferred treatment location. Norfolk and Waveney has marked this ambition ‘complete’, noting that 742 patients in total have been able to choose a different hospital for their care.
Click here to see the full progress report.
In other news from Norfolk and Waveney, last month we highlighted how the ICB shared a tender with an estimated value of £1,250,000 to £1,425,000 for the procurement of a population health management digital solution, capable of offering bespoke data analysis, technical solutions and digital platforms.
Earlier in the year, we shared the ICB’s inclusion in the second year of the Clinical Entrepreneur Programme Innovation Sites (InSites) programme, designed to bring together NHS provider organisations to test innovative ways of patient care and evaluate them in real-world settings; and plans to develop a new service to support digitally excluded patients across the system.
