Barts Health NHS Trust has published their Group Operational Plan for 2022 – 2023, setting out their vision, objectives and some of the ways in which they plan to achieve them.
One area of focus of the plan highlights that the trust will align some of its functions with Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, including support functions, digital strategy and recruitment and retention.
The group has three key objectives, which it states: “to create a truly inclusive organisation, without discrimination, and meet our ambition to be an outstanding place to work”; “to improve health and care services for all our population – transforming clinical services whilst reducing health inequalities and inequities of provision”; and “to build effective partnerships across the health and social care system and deliver social value for communities through our longer term strategic plans”.
Methods to achieve this focus on creating an inclusive leadership, advancing integrated care and implementing new care models, among others.
Digital is to play a role in the advancement of integrated care through the pooling of resources; “we will work with Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust on improving urgent and emergency care, developing neurosciences, networking specialised services and increasing participation in research,” the strategy states. “The two trusts will seek to align our separate organisational support functions, such as digital strategy and our approach to recruitment and retention.”
The strategy notes that the trust will engage in a drive to go paperless. “We will roll out electronic prescribing of medicines to paediatric and maternity services,” it notes, and “upgrade equipment and networks in line with the NHS adoption of Office 365.” The trust will also continue their work to migrate data from physical datacentres onto the Cloud, and finalise wireless connectivity in hospitals.
“These steps will strengthen infrastructure resilience and improve cyber security. Digitising cellular and histopathology services will also support the consolidation of diagnostics across NEL.”
The use of data is a key point within the strategy. Along with the above, the trust plans to use data to promote health equality; “we now have ethnicity data for almost all our patients, which allows us to ensure we are managing our waiting lists fairly and equitably. We are considering how to publish this data in a format that is most useful for our patients and communities.”
In addition, data will be used to support advanced research, with the trust planning to “seek a Barts Charity grant to create an integrated data warehouse and access service for researchers into the early detection and treatment of diseases.”
To read the strategy in full, please click here.
