Annual Report and Accounts 2012/13 - Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital

2. Our Priorities for 2013/14
Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust
Quality Report 2012/13
31
The Trust’s priorities
Transforming what we do: our step change
for the future.
Patient safety and the quality of care
we offer remains paramount for the
RD&E’s Board. Yet we recognise that
continuing to deliver safe, quality
care within a constrained financial
environment is the single biggest
challenge facing the Trust.
For a number of years now we have
sought to increase the efficiency and
effectiveness of what we do, whilst
maintaining or even improving quality
and safety. Changing what we do
and how we do it has enabled us to
meet our savings targets without any
compromise to the quality and safety
of the services we offer. Whilst much
remains to be done to streamline
processes and eliminate inefficiencies
within the hospital, the Board has
taken the view that incremental
change – whilst important – is unlikely
to deliver the type of transformation
that will be required to sustain the
breadth of services we offer and to
deliver them in a sustainable and safe
way. That is why we now have a single
transformational change programme,
which is designed to enable us to
deliver clinically safe and financially
sustainable care for our patients within
an increasingly challenging economic
environment.
One of the first tasks for the new
programme was to bring together
the large number of improvement
initiatives that have developed
over previous years. Many of these
individual projects were valuable in
creating change. However, we felt
that by assessing their effectiveness
and placing them within a coherent
framework with explicit priorities, we
could ensure cross-learning as well as
weed out duplication of effort. Our
renewed transformation programme
now has six key themes:
• Patient journeys through the
hospital and beyond
From the moment patients are
referred to the RD&E until their
transfer home or to onward care,
they are on a ‘pathway’ through
our services. We have embarked
on a process to look at these
pathways in detail, with the aim of
making every patient’s pathway as
smooth and effective as possible.
The project aims to achieve a
reduction in delays through the
system; a better utilisation of our
bed stock; appropriate reductions
in the length of stay and to
ensure that patient outcomes and
experience are integrated into our
improvement work. As well as
work within our 'four walls' this
project will increasingly involve
integrating our improvements with
external partners in primary and
social care
• Patient safety
We have a patient safety
programme to provide a clear
focus on safety issues as well
as ensuring that a standardised
approach to safety can be
implemented. Over the next year
the patient safety programme will
be increasingly integrated within
our work on improving patient
pathways
• Efficient use of resources
We will need to continue to
identify year on year efficiency
savings to meet our financial
targets. The transformation
programme will examine a
wide range of areas – such as
procurement and back office
functions – to ensure that our
processes are as efficient as
possible, that we are adopting
the use of technology, and that
we identify ways to improve how
some of our functional areas are
organised
• Communications and
engagement
For our transformation programme
to succeed, we are engaging
with our staff and stakeholders.
We want to build a culture of
continuous improvement so that
we are able to sustain our high
quality services. Staff engagement
is central in making these projects
work. It is often those on the
frontline who have the best ideas
about how to change things for
the better. Engagement of our
clinical staff is vital in ensuring that
change adds value for patients and
the RD&E. All our transformation
projects are overseen by a small
group of clinicians and managers