Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT) has around 8,000 staff across its Winchester, Basingstoke and Andover sites. On my visit to its Winchester hospital, I was deeply impressed by the passion and commitment of the staff and leadership team. Financial and operational pressures as well as a degrading estate are being met with a determined focus on patient and community needs. The trust is developing new services, investing in its workforce and infrastructure and forging links with the local community.
We began by visiting one of the trust’s two hospices, where we met Maddy, the inspirational consultant nurse who saw the potential to improve palliative and end-of-life care by converting a historical building onsite to provide out-of-hospital care. Bringing together the local community in fundraising, she and her palliative care colleagues raised nearly £4m to open the facility. They now care for 10 patients at a time, offering a range of outpatient and community services. Being NHS-run and co-located, patients can easily access hospital services, when necessary, but the team tries to offer an alternative and more accessible, personalised route to care through the hospice.
We moved on to the trust’s recently redeveloped pharmacy, which houses a robot dispensary and enables better workflows as well as space for staff training and development. The team has also built links with education, employment and apprenticeship schemes and as a result is seeing improved retention rates and staff progression.
Looking ahead, the trust has been awarded funding as part of the New Hospital Programme, with a new hospital set to serve Basingstoke by 2032. Services continue to develop in the meantime, with a surgical records room being converted into a hip and knee hub, due to open in 2024. With two theatres planned initially, there will be room for 28 beds, and the hub will serve patients from across the area as Hampshire Hospitals works in partnership with other local trusts. The trust has also set up a virtual health hub, supporting telecare in care homes, along with Covid-19, frailty and heart care services. It also has links with GPs and ambulance services to make sure care is given in the right place at the right time with support from specialist clinicians.
Underpinning this work is the trust’s commitment to its staff. As chair Steve Erskine said: “We’ve got brilliant people doing brilliant things every day.” Chief executive Alex Whitfield talked me through the trust’s investment in workforce, the use made of apprenticeship schemes, and the support given to international staff to help them settle into the UK. The impact of this work is clear in improved retention rates and decreased spending on agency staff, as well as recognition of quality of care in patient surveys. The high level of staff engagement and their sense of ownership of the services they deliver shone through.
As is often the case, I am blown away by the positivity of people in the NHS despite the multitude of challenges they face. At HHFT, this can-do approach seems to have been deliberately cultivated by the board. This approach, alongside effective leadership development, empowering the workforce to make improvements themselves, and fostering a patient-first culture, has seen improvements in staff retention, staff progression and satisfaction.
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