New opportunities for joint working as Norfolk and Waveney Acute Hospital Collaborative takes off
Norfolk and Waveney’s three acute hospitals – James Paget University Hospital, the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn – have been working more closely together for the last three years to improve care for patients.
In the summer, system leaders came together to agree a new collective vision and shared objectives which will guide our plans for the future. We have collaborated on many projects and services recently and we are committed to working even more closely together to further improve patient care and staff experience.
That’s why we’ve decided to call ourselves the Norfolk and Waveney Acute Hospital Collaborative which enables us to reach our ambitions for patient care whilst remaining separate organisations. We are part of the wider Integrated Care System which includes health social care, local authorities and voluntary organisations.
Our vision:
By working together, we will provide you with high quality hospital care when you need it, supporting you to get the care and treatment you need.
Our objectives:
- We will listen to what you say and work together to build health services which meet your needs and the needs of our local communities across Norfolk and Waveney.
- Together, we will support our staff to have rewarding careers and a good experience working in our hospitals.
- Public money will be used efficiently to provide better, safer and faster care across Norfolk and Waveney
As the collaborative develops, there will be more opportunities to support each other operationally, making our services more resilient across the three Trusts. It will also be easier to attract and retain high calibre people if we can provide interesting roles and development opportunities across our hospitals.
We are already starting work on projects such as the development of a joint Acute Clinical Strategy which will look at the needs of patients and design services around them. The aim is through working collaboratively to reduce long waits, improve health by acting early and tackling health inequalities. We aim to see patients as a whole, rather than a series of conditions and to provide high quality, resilient services.
Joint policies, such as our shared consent policy and the procedural documents launched recently, which standardises our approach to policies and guidelines, will help us to provide safe consistent services and make it easier for staff to work on different sites.
The Electronic Patient Record is a priority for us and it will transform our services in the longer term. You will start to hear more about this in significant change next year as we start to make paper a thing of the past, improving efficiency and experience for patients and staff and providing more information for primary care professionals, universally saving time. We are also working on plans for three DACs (diagnostic assessment centres) – one at each hospital – to improve access to diagnostics and reduce waiting times for treatment, especially for a cancer diagnosis.