Annual Conference and Exhibition 2022

Samira Ahmed, award winning journalist and broadcaster will open the conference.

In this keynote speech Saffron Cordery will reflect on the challenges trusts face as they work to deliver consistently high-quality care for patients and service users. She will elaborate on the overarching theme of the conference – resilience – making the case for a strong and sustainable NHS fit to withstand the shocks and turbulence of these times, rather than relying on the ‘wrong’ kind of resilience, where people feel compelled to power on through exhaustion, putting on a brave front whatever problems they may encounter. Saffron will highlight findings from our latest State of the Provider Sector survey setting out trust leaders’ concerns as we head into winter. While acknowledging pressures on the quality of care, she will underline NHS Providers’ commitment to defending the reputation of the NHS, highlighting trusts’ achievements and successes on many fronts, including their leadership role in the development of system working.

The concept of ‘spheres of influence’ is helpful for exploring how trusts can work with their system partners to support progress towards the aim of reducing health inequalities for the populations they serve. Trusts are looking beyond their traditional role as providers of healthcare services to consider how they can contribute to the wider determinants of health, as well as work with their system partners to support their aims. Through our understanding of the spheres of influence trusts operate within, the session will explore three closely related roles trusts can play in reducing health inequalities; as healthcare providers, as system partners, and as anchor institutions. 
   

There is significant evidence recommending use of ambulatory pathways to increase accessibility of care, increase throughput and capacity within healthcare settings, and to safely deliver a larger case mix than currently undertaken. There are a number of challenges in successfully implementing these models: the management of patients with complex co-morbidities, the lack of dedicated infrastructure reducing efficiency, and the alignment of clinical and operational processes throughout the pathway. We will explore the opportunities around increasing the volume of ambulatory surgery, the potential solutions to overcoming some of the barriers, and optimizing the patient experience through such methods as procedure-specific remote patient management.  

In recent years, NHS national policy has begun to move away from competition to collaboration, inspiring a nationwide shift in perspective and practice, particularly after the success of combined efforts during the pandemic. Today, collaborative NHS workforce efforts are leading the way to removing practical barriers to workforce challenges, sustainably.  

An example of these efforts are collaborative staff banks, and whereas their concept was historically perceived as a risk, the idea of multiple Trusts merging their workforce to create a larger and growing staff pool has now evolved as a natural response to growing challenges to fill vacant shifts and catch up on the elective care backlog with NHS demands at an all-time high. Collaborative staff banks help build resilient workforce systems, reduce overhead costs and admin time, and increase shift fill rates to ultimately deliver further patient hours while enabling flexibility of healthcare professionals and empowering them. 

In this session, Dr Ahmed Shahrabani, CEO and co-founder of Locum's Nest, will be joined by NHS peers, Natalie Nightingale, Head of Temporary Staffing and North Central London ICS Lead at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Lee Gutcher, Programme Manager at North Central London, who are spearheading the new North Central London Medical Collaborative Bank. During the discussion, reflecting on their experience, they will touch on setting up a collaborative bank, including the challenges involved and solutions that enabled the organisations to overcome them.

To successfully drive the equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) agenda forward, it is important for NHS providers to follow the new National Procurement Policy and focus on social value/EDI within their contractual/procurement processes. This is part of embedding EDI at board level and the CQC will be examining organisations’ approaches to EDI as part of assessing whether they are “well led”. It is also important for NHS providers to retain a grip on such issues, even where services or supplies are being procured at an Integrated Care System or Provider Alliance level.

Whilst many organisations are already focusing on EDI in the context of service users and workforce, the role of procurement in tackling EDI issues should not be underestimated. NHS leaders need to ensure that suppliers are clear about the standards which are expected of them in this area, as well as focusing on getting them right internally.

Mary Mundy and Paul McFarlane will be joined by guest speaker Elisa Lamb to discuss how EDI can be embraced and promoted through public procurement, alongside workforce and service delivery initiatives.

Many more people are waiting even longer for care and treatment than they were before the start of the pandemic. The prevalence, acuity and complexity of mental health needs has also grown dramatically, widening levels of unmet needs despite significant progress made in recent years to improve and expand services. Collaboration across providers and their partners is a key part of bearing down on backlogs and tackling future challenges across physical and mental health care services. The mental health sector has been at the forefront of developing and implementing provider collaboratives, with all mental health trusts now part of one or more collaborative. This session will provide an opportunity for peer learning and sharing good practice, as well as a discussion on how mental health collaboratives are approaching the future and what else might be needed to make the most out of the opportunities ahead.

The discussion will explore how both staff and providers are working in new ways, and what this means for effective service delivery, staff wellbeing and the future workforce pipeline. We would also like to discuss the immediate and longer-term staffing challenges, and focus on innovative approaches to workforce planning, management, and deployment which local systems and organisations are taking in response.

Hempsons, leading health, social care and charity lawyers lead this session, exploring: 

• What you need to know about public inquiries
• What we know so far about the Covid-19 Inquiry
• The Inquiry’s power to gather evidence
• Strategic considerations

This session will explore how person-centred equality, diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing strategies can naturally align with building an organisational culture of psychological safety and accountability to support building of resilience at both organisational and individual level.  

We’ll provide insight into approaches to equality, diversity, inclusion and wellbeing, and dialogic and cultural OD, incorporating thinking on workforce engagement and optimisation and how providers can use this to transform their thinking.   

We talk a lot as part of developing inclusive cultures and compassionate leadership about giving people permission to be their whole selves at work, recognising the holistic person and fostering an environment where people can be their authentic selves within the workplace. At some point between that person-centred conversation and our planning of our workforce, we lose that connection.  So, how do we move beyond ‘traditional’ approaches to workforce inclusion and planning and put people at the centre of our workforce planning, strategy and delivery, building accountable cultures that support psychological safety and resilience?   

As we begin to grapple with the emerging concept of Integrated Care Systems and the complex nature of both the structures and the relationships involved, a meaningful and lasting change is needed in the conversations being had.  

The discussion will include the power of communities and their conversations in addressing the challenges and opportunities around resilience. How through these conversations, new perspectives and solutions are developed that are not the same old solutions to the same old problems, but unique insights into deeply held beliefs and experiences that can help unlock potential and shape better solutions to these complex problems. 

Provider collaboratives at scale are key components of integrated care systems.  This session will include contributions from leading collaboratives to explore how they develop and agree form and governance for resilient collaboration including:

• Options for collaboration from informal to formal, legally binding group arrangements.
• Understanding and using new statutory powers for joint working, joint committees, and delegation.
• Securing involvement of other providers, stakeholders, and local communities.
• The impact of the new Code of Governance including the role of NEDs and governors in system working.
• Mutual accountability and liability mechanisms for shared objectives and service delivery.
• Integration between provider collaboratives and place-based partnerships.
• Top tips to cut through complexity and bureaucracy.

With inflation currently at over 10%, and significant global supply chain challenges, maintaining a cost effective and resilient supply of medical products to support the recovery of care backlogs and deliver efficiencies is an imperative for Executives across the system. 

As part of the NHS, NHS Supply Chain know that supply chain resilience is fundamental to ensure clinicians have the products they need to provide safe and excellent patient care.

In this session hear about how NHS Supply Chain is addressing these challenges to support excellent patient care. Chris Holmes, Executive Director of Supply Chain, will be joined by NHS peers, Heather Tierney-Moore OBE, Chair of the Board of SCCL, the management function of NHS Supply Chain, and Simon Clarke, Managing Director, BSOL Procurement Collaborative and Procurement Lead - Birmingham and Solihull ICS. Reflecting on their experience, they will touch on the economic challenges and highlight examples of working in collaboration with the system to develop solutions which further improve the resilience of the national procurement and supply chain service in order to reduce the impact of risk for trusts.

This breakout session will bring together an expert panel to discuss how we embed accountability for race equality at all levels. This session has been developed based on insights from our members, who identified three key areas required for meaningful change on race equality. These are:

1. hearts and mind change
2. giving leaders the confidence and capability to act through evidence of what works
3. asking leaders to take accountability to embed race equality at the heart of the board’s business.

In addition to these three requirements, there was  consensus among our members that national bodies could do more to help boards take effective action on race equality. Chairs have stressed that national bodies must lead by example and clearly prioritise and promote work on race equality. In addition to this, while the recently published ‘Leadership for a collaborative and inclusive future’ review by General Sir Gordon Messenger and Dame Linda Pollard calls for equality, diversity, and inclusion to be embedded at all levels, it also outlines that inclusive leadership is the responsibility of all leaders and recommends a commitment to the promotion of equal opportunity and fairness standards at entry and mid-career level. The review further encourages wider enforcement of existing measures to improve EDI through the setting of improvement goals and recognises there is an enhanced role for the CQC in measuring EDI outcomes. 

As of 1 July 2022, each Integrated Care System (ICS) will have an Integrated Care Board (ICB), a statutory organisation bringing the NHS together locally to improve population health and establish shared strategic priorities within the NHS - there are questions around what implications this will have on race equality.

This session will explore the role of national bodies in embedding accountability race equality at all levels in the context of the above insights.

This session will bring together health and care system partners to discuss how they are working together to improve the mental and physical health of their local communities. We are inviting an NHS trust leader to share their experience of acting as an anchor institution in providing training, education and employment opportunities to create resilient communities. This will be followed by a panel discussion looking at how place-based collaborative working can improve the lives of local populations by thinking collectively about issues such as health inequalities and the cost-of-living crisis. We expect the discussion will also consider enablers and barriers to integration and what support is needed at a local and national level.

The integration of health and care has been at the heart of local and national conversation in the NHS for decades. Delivering better joined up care – across hospitals, mental health services, community providers, social care, primary care, and wider partners such as the voluntary sector – is a central ambition for national policy makers and local practitioners alike. Yet, moving from ambition to delivery is one of the biggest challenges facing policymakers, system leaders, and frontline teams.

To focus efforts and to work at a scale where integration will have the biggest impact on service delivery, the importance of place has been strongly advocated in national policy frameworks. It gives a tangible and practical scale for staff and leaders to design new services and models of care, and to work together to deliver better outcomes for the local population – in other words, to integrate.

NHS Providers and Newton have been working together to produce some delivery-focused support to help place-based partnerships make integrated health and care a reality. The work will be launched in September to members, and we are proud to be bringing it to life in this session. It will be of interest to all leaders involved in improving service delivery at place level, offering practical support with delivering on key priorities set by the partnership and making sure they translate to value, impact, and better outcomes on the ground. 

Chair:

Miriam Deakin, Interim Deputy Chief Executive / Director of Policy and Strategy, NHS Providers

Panellists:

Dr Louise Clarke, Strategic Clinical Director of Strategy and Planning, NHS Bradford District and Craven CCG

Becky Taylor, Group Director of Transformation and Quality Improvement, University Hospitals of Northamptonshire NHS Group

David McMullan, Director, Newton Europe

Shifting the tide against backlogs takes more than a technical solution - it takes an approach that combines systems thinking with new leadership models. With the right combination of technical improvements and the human dimensions of change we can work through backlogs to sustain increases in patient access while simultaneously improving the experience for team members.

This session will explore proven models and practices that your team can immediately embrace to drive positive momentum and jump the curve against backlogs.

In April 2021, one North West-based Trust set out to revolutionise how its teams completed time consuming and repetitive tasks by deploying automation across their back office departments. 15 months on, automation is supporting people across HR, Booking & Scheduling and Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and is releasing critical time back to staff and improving data quality.

But they’re not stopping there. The Trust has ambitious plans for the coming year, which include scaling their deployment to their clinical functions and democratising the benefits of automation across the local ICS.

This presentation will chart their journey to date, and explore their plans for the future.

Improved utilisation of data in a digital healthcare environment would have a significant impact on the outcomes for patients and build a more resilient healthcare system.  The challenges of data security and interoperability across an increasingly broad ecosystem, are significant but not insurmountable.  Professor Miller and the panel discuss the issues, insights on bringing stakeholders together and driving consensus on best practice. 

The Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care invited to discuss what he sees as the priorities for the NHS.

Given operational pressures, a relatively generous but tight funding settlement, and growing calls for NHS reform, this panel will consider how the NHS can take full advantage of innovation to support the backlog recovery and boost its resilience for the future. The NHS has begun to adopt whole population health management, genomics-based medicine, digital, and data analytics to embed long-term transformational change across systems, but there remains questions about how to ensure equity is embedded throughout the adoption of these new ways of working and providing care. Given the broad scope of ‘transformation’, we have suggested a range of speakers to explore the potential for radical changes to healthcare delivery, with a focus on the care backlog and demand and capacity challenges facing the NHS today, and how to ensure the NHS is put on a more financially sustainable footing.  

Samira Ahmed, award winning journalist and broadcaster will close the conference.

Sir Ron Kerr, opens the drinks reception with a speech.

Conference day 1 close.

We would like to thank Newton who will be sponsoring our drinks reception. 

Sir Ron Kerr will give the opening remarks and will hand over to Andrew Davidson, National Head of Employment, Hempsons and Colin Edmondson, Director; Care Beyond the Hospital for a word from our sponsors.

We would like to thank Hempsons and BD (Becton, Dickinson and Co.) who will be sponsoring our conference dinner.

Amar Latif likes a challenge. A successful entrepreneur, he gave up his hard-won role as Head of Commercial Finance at BT to start his own travel company. He’s travelled the world, skydived, ski-ed, climbed, even done a spot of acting, and is also a TV presenter. A remarkable enough set of achievements, made more impressive because Amar has been blind since he was 18-years-old. 

Amar will share his personal story and the lessons he has learned in resilience, diversity and motivation. His enthusiastic and determined take on life is infectious and his story inspiring. 

Find out more about Traveleyes here.

The successful delivery of proactive and preventative models of care has enormous potential to transform our health and care systems. Improving population health is a core strategic aim for integrated care systems, and many trusts and their system partners are considering which population health management (PHM) approaches will best support them in understanding the needs of their population, enabling care and support to be designed and proactively delivered to meet individual needs.   

The Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System is one system looking to drive the best possible outcomes and prevent demand downstream through a new PHM programme, which is being designed and delivered at place and neighbourhood level. The team has put the delivery of measurable improvements to outcomes for the 65 and over population at the heart of its plans. Work to date has focused on a ‘proof of concept’ phase, to build an evidence base for the opportunity afforded by preventative models of care, including a proof-of-concept machine learning tool which is enabling the prediction of over seven out of every ten patients who will be admitted to an acute hospital in the next three months. The model has the potential to identify over 30,000 people per year who are most in need of targeted support across the system. In this session, we will share the steps taken and key learnings so far from this project, and how this data driven model will be used to design and deliver interventions which lead to measurably improved outcomes for people.   

For this session, we have also assembled an expert panel bringing a range of perspectives from across the sector to discuss the wider context of PHM and opportunities and challenges in delivering improved outcomes in this area. Visit the Newton stand (32) at 8am to grab a complementary coffee and some breakfast and join us afterwards in theatre C where we will begin the panel session shortly after. 

Chair:

Robin Vickers, Partner, Newton

Panellists:

Sir Andrew Cash, Chair, Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board 

Stuart Bell, Former Chief Executive, Oxford Health and South London and Maudsley 

Pete Nicholas, Lead Consultant, Newton Europe 

Ric Whalley, Partner, Newton Europe 

Samira Ahmed, award winning journalist and broadcaster will open the conference.

In one of the first opportunities to hear from the new secretary of state for health and social care, Steve Barclay will share his priorities and vision for the NHS at what is a pivotal time for the service.  

In this session we’ll discuss new research from the GMC which explores the reasons behind doctors’ decision to leave UK practice and the steps employers and the wider system must take to retain them. In the face of huge pressures on the system, identifying these triggers is crucial to tackling workforce issues and delivering first-class care.  

Focusing on workforce themes including: wellbeing; equality, diversity and inclusion; ongoing recruitment and retention of healthcare professionals. 

Educational technology is improving the experience of education and training for the health and care workforce, supporting their development now and in the future, saving money and resources and enabling new ways of managing and delivering care. 

The adoption of new technologies and access to online learning resources is changing how, where and when people learn by providing greater flexibility, equitable access to technology, improved digital literacy and offering bespoke education solutions for organisations, educators and learners. It has proved vital to clinical training, and the creation of a skilled workforce with the levels of training needed for them to care for patients and tackle the resource and service delivery challenges facing the NHS today. 

This session will explain how HEE’s Technology Enhanced Learning Team (TEL) is leading on the implementation of educational technology in the NHS and social care, supporting learners to have equitable access to the latest online resources and widening participation, while giving organisations and educators the skills to design, develop and deliver virtual and hybrid learning and access the latest simulation and immersive educational technologies. 

Health Education England is the national health ‘statutory education body’ responsible for all healthcare education in England. This session will be an opportunity to share the learning from the last decade and explore how we best ensure there continues to be a motivated highly trained medical workforce to meet changing patient and population needs. It will include a summary of innovative reform work, lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic and how plans will help future system resilience.

Delegates are invited to join us for a  vibrant session of short presentations to explore our experiences and share your ideas and insights. 

The health and care system has been tasked with laying the foundations for a digital future by 2025 and beyond. The Department for Health and Social Care and NHS England plan for digital health and social care consolidates the various national digital goals into a single action plan. This will require health and care organisations to build the appropriate digital capabilities which can only be achieved through embedding a digital culture. Leaders therefore need to understand how to bring new skills into their teams, how to lead a truly digital organisation and ultimately how to deliver change. This session will include: 

• practical tips to recruit and retain digital skills
• learning on how to lead digital teams and provide appropriate oversight
• opportunities to collaborate and fund new innovative teams
• how to recruit and create a “critical mass” for change within your organisation.

Structured approaches to improvement can play a key role in helping trusts navigate their way through a challenging context, when central to their strategic vision and delivery. This session brings together boards with members of the Health Foundation’s Q Community to explore the role improvers can play in helping withstand the unexpected and respond to a changing context. Exploring the questions boards should be asking, the panel will share insights and approaches that could help senior leaders gain a stronger sense of what is really happening across large and complex organisations and systems.

As progress against the backlog starts to have impact, this session will review how the accelerated implementation of the NHS Diagnostic strategy can further optimise throughput. It will discuss the core tactics of the NHSE strategy and see how pathway development and partnership with industry can support backlog reduction.

A chance to hear from NHS England’s chief executive about the challenges facing the sector as we head into the winter period. 

Dr Navina Evans joins us to discuss embedding inclusive leadership practice and promoting the values of equality, diversity, and antiracism in leadership to help support the resilience of the NHS and the wellbeing of its workforce.  

Closing comments from NHS Providers' next Chief Executive, Julian Hartley. 

Samira Ahmed, award winning journalist and broadcaster will close the conference.