Hospitals ‘Transform for Excellence’

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust is ‘Transforming for Excellence’ (TfE), changing the way it performs to deal with the economic downturn.

This will involve all departments across the Trust’s five local hospitals (North Manchester General Hospital, Fairfield General Hospital, The Royal Oldham Hospital, Rochdale Infirmary and Birch Hill Hospital).

The Trust is already planning a number of changes as part of TfE:

For outpatients:
- Reducing the number of outpatient clinic cancellations.
- Reducing the number of outpatients who fail to attend appointments.
- Arranging follow-up appointments in line with best national clinical practice.

For inpatients:
- Making better use of theatre lists during the normal working day to make sure that routine patients have their surgery in core hours rather than at evenings and weekends.
- Helping patients return home more quickly by reducing clinically unnecessary lengths of stay
- Avoiding the need for overnight stays by increasing the number of patients treated by day case surgery.

For all patients:
- Eliminating variation in clinical practice unless based on the need of individual patients.

Some immediate measures are to be introduced immediately, including:
- Reviewing payments made to the top 150 earners within the Trust.
- Stopping senior management recruitment
- Stopping the use of expensive agency staff in non-clinical areas.
- Helping staff back to work by reviewing sickness absence.
- Stopping all first class travel.

John Saxby, chief executive, said: “Our overriding aim is to make sure we continue to provide safe, sustainable and excellent services for our local communities. To do that through the economic downturn and beyond we need to look at how we provide services. We need to transform the way services are provided.”

Mr Saxby emphasised the importance of the Trust’s 10,000 staff being involved in the programme. 600 members of staff have already attended meetings with him to hear what Transforming for Excellence will entail.

“This is not a ‘knee jerk’ or ‘slash and burn’ initiative,” he explained. “I am confident that we can improve patient safety, the quality of our services and reduce costs by looking at how we do things, working differently and by improving and changing clinical practice.”

The NHS is facing a shortfall estimated to be between £15bn and £20bn over the next 3-4 years. Estimates put growth in NHS funding between 0 and 2 per cent per year. At a local level, this will require The Trust to find efficiency improvements of between 4 and 5 per cent per year over each of the next four years.

In 2009/10 the Trust spent over half a billion pounds (£544,860,000) on providing hospital services – the equivalent of over £1.4m a day. In 2010/11, the Trust will need to save around £20m (about 3.5% of its current budget) with further cost savings to be made in future years of around 4.5% per year.