Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust Quality Account 2016-2017

Statement from the Director of Nursing & Midwifery and the Medical Director
The cornerstone of Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust’s philosophy is to provide the best
possible care for all our patients, underpinned by our values:
We put patient safety above all else
We aspire to excellence
We reflect, we learn, we improve
We respect and support each other
We have successfully delivered Year 1 of our three year Quality Improvement Strategy with
programmes aligned to our Quality Priorities to make our care safer, more effective and to improve
the experience of our patients and families.
We have achieved the majority of our key performance indicators including the Referral to
Treatment Time but did not achieve the national access standard of 95% for patients being treated
within four hours in the Accident and Emergency Department. Although this was disappointing, our
patients have rated their experience highly and we were assured that patient care was not
adversely affected.
The focus on patient safety remains a priority for all our staff and this culture is embedded
throughout the Trust. We continued to make significant progress in reducing the numbers of
hospital-acquired pressure ulcers and consistently improved the delivery of harm free care as
measured by the “Safety Thermometer”.
We continue to encourage our staff to report incidents so that we are able to improve the care
given to our patients as a result of learning from incident reports and investigations. During the
year, we focussed our work in infection prevention and control on reducing the number of patients
contracting C Difficile and MRSA.
Our improvements in patient experience have been recognised nationally with a prestigious award
from the Patient Experience Network. Our patients are telling us the care we are providing is
improving, with 92.3% recommending our services to their family and friends in comparison to
89.2% last year.
The results of the National Staff Survey were exceptionally positive this year which continues to
build on the year improvements that we have made since 2013. The survey showed 12 statistically
significant improvements including overall levels of staff engagement with no areas of
deterioration. There were significant improvements in staff recommending the Trust as a place to
work, staff agreeing that their role makes a difference to patients and their carers and the
satisfaction of staff with the quality of the work that they are able to deliver. Overall, we were in the
top 5 most improved Trusts in the country.
One area of concern that has come through from the survey is that not all of our staff are
consistently living our Trust value of ‘we respect and support each other’. This will be an area of
focus for us in the coming year.
We welcomed the sustained improvement in the Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI)
and Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR) which are among the lowest in our peer group
and reflect our aim to place patient safety above all else. Building on our work in this area we are
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