Chapter three: Our strategic priorities

We provide safe, effective services which help people keep mentally and physically well, get better when they are ill and stay as well as they can to the end of their lives. 

Delivering great care is about maintaining high quality standards – standards which improve the experience for service users and staff and enable us to provide safe, effective services. Our formula for great care is a simple as 1, 2, 3: 

Safe + Effective + Experience = Great care 

• Safety is paramount 
• Effectiveness is measured 
• Experiences of service users and staff guide us

SEE our formula for great care! 

We treat thousands of people every day and service user safety means working proactively to minimise the chance that things could go wrong. If they do, we are open and honest with people and their families about what has happened and we take steps to reduce the chance that the same thing could happen again. 

Clinical effectiveness means providing the right care for each individual service user. It means we are constantly thinking about what we do and consider whether it is having the desired result for each service user. If it is not, we will make a change. 

Our service users are at the centre of everything we do. By listening to service users and asking them about their experience, we will ensure that they, and their families and carers, are receiving care that is respectful of, and responsive to, individual service user preferences, needs and values. 

Our communities are at the heart of what we do and we will work alongside our communities to improve the way we deliver care. 

Alongside Communities is the Solent approach to engagement and inclusion. It was co-created with people from our local communities including community groups, voluntary organisations and people who work in our services. 

Alongside Communities describes our ambitions to improve health, reduce health inequalities and improve the experience of care for people who use our services. 

We shall do that by: 

• Enabling people who use our services and members of our local community to actively participate in activities, groups and key decisions 
• Continuing to extend our reach to the community recognising the skills and expertise they have to offer 
• Building positive relationships with those individuals and groups who experience inequities in health and health care provision. 

We will focus on outcomes that matter, co-created with the people who know our services best.

We will co-create outcomes with service users, communities and partners, including those who are seldom heard. We will seek to understand how we can positively impact experiences of care and health outcomes by listening, understanding how we’re doing, continuing to do the things we do right, constantly learning and improving. Outcomes will be meaningful, measurable and transparent. 

Outcomes will clearly describe the impact on people and communities and reflect and measure the effectiveness of care. They will be used to: 

• Improve the way we deliver care – we will ensure our services are focusing on the priorities which really matter to people and achieving outcomes that count. 
• Enhance quality, safety and experience of care – we will be transparent and open when we make mistakes, involving people at every stage to co-produce the learning and improvement. 
• Improve access to care – we will work with communities to develop innovative approaches to maximise equitable access to healthcare. 

We will adopt a life-course approach which removes barriers and personalises care. 

Everyones’ health and wellbeing is influenced through their life by a wide range of social, economic, environment and behavioural practices. We will take a life course approach to prevent ill health which recognises all the different factors which influence our ability to remain well and independent. As part of this approach, we will personalise our care ensuring individual priorities, strengths and needs are at the centre. We will actively seek to remove barriers to good care by working collaboratively to improve service user experience. 

• Through our life course approach we will focus on maximising potential in childhood and early adulthood, maintaining good health, living successfully with chronic disease and anticipating and responding to decline. 
• We will personalise care focusing on the question ‘what matters to you?’, ensuring people have choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered. 
• We will work collaboratively to develop seamless pathways which remove barriers to care and reduce unnecessary handovers between teams/organisations. 
• We will seek to make every contact we have with service users count, encouraging behaviour change, prioritising early intervention and enabling access to a range of services which will enable people to live well. 

We will work collaboratively, at the appropriate scale, as one health and care team. 

Organisational boundaries in health and care delivery are not important to service users. We will work alongside our communities, other health and care providers and providers from the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector to create delivery teams which provide appropriate services at the right scale, according to need. We will not work in isolation and we will be one health and care team. 

Our services will be delivered at the appropriate level of scale to ensure they meet the needs of our local communities. 

For us, there are three key levels of scale: in neighbourhoods alongside Primary Care and Primary Care Networks (PCNs), place-based at a city/sub-county level and at an Integrated Care System (ICS) level across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight (HIOW). 

Alongside Primary Care and PCNs

• We will work alongside primary care to provide and share workforce to meet the needs of our communities across the life-course. 
• We will work alongside PCNs to help improve the long-term resilience of primary care, supporting organisational delivery and enabling PCNs to benefit from our scale and resources (e.g. operational support, governance, estates, facilities, technology and workforce, including wellbeing). 
• We will help build trust and relationships with our colleagues working in local communities, focusing on joint working - not competition – identifying clear ways of working and developing the demonstrator hub model based around Solent GP practices. 

Place-based

• We will work with colleagues in community health, mental health, local authorities and local acute Trusts to develop appropriate models of care and tailor our services to meet local needs at a city/sub-county level. 
• We will provide specialist, proactive services in partnership with health and social care providers and the voluntary and community sector to reduce health inequalities, enable people to live well and ensure people are able to remain in their home environment wherever possible. 
• We will work in partnership to improve responsive (intermediate) models of care (emergency response, hospital at home, community and mental health beds, Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC), rehabilitation services etc.) to reduce pressure on acute services and help ensure people are treated in the right place at the right time. 
  

ICS-level

• As key partners in the HIOW ICS, we will provide clinical leadership to co-create comprehensive, effective pathways of care across HIOW. We will ensure models of care meet local need at each level of scale, enable people to live well, reduce health inequalities and improve experience of care. 
• We will adopt the ‘one NHS team’ approach and embrace the new NHS Duty to Collaborate; jointly owning ICS ambitions to provide effective, appropriate, resilient services across HIOW. 
• Where services benefit from being delivered at scale by a single provider (e.g. integrated sexual health, HIV, specialist dental services) we will lead their delivery, if we are best placed to do so, embracing an ethos of continuous improvement, in line with our clinical objectives. 

We will drive and embrace research and innovation to deliver excellent, evidence-based care. 

We believe that excellent care is underpinned by a culture of learning and innovation. We are committed to the principle that research active organisations provide better service user outcomes. 

• We will drive and support the development of a strong evidence base around community and mental health care services. We will do this with academic and service user partners. 
• We will continue to increase access to research, innovation and improvement opportunities for staff and service users, particularly for those not usually included. Research and innovation will be a core part of our workforce and organisational development planning, and a core component of leadership capability. 
• We will use structured methods to continuously evaluate and quality improve our services. We will ensure learning is shared locally and nationally. 
• We will use research and innovation principles to help us establish innovative partnership working with other providers, our service users and our communities. 

We will ensure strong clinical and professional leadership is at the heart of delivery and decision making across our area. 

We are proud of our clinicians who work in multidisciplinary teams, increasingly breaking down traditional professional boundaries. They are at the heart of our organisation, working with service users and alongside GPs and clinicians from other organisations. 

We will empower clinicians at all levels to feel integral to their service and to identify and describe change alongside strong operational support. 

To us, strong clinical and professional leadership means: 

• Inspiring and driving change 
• Focusing agendas around person centred quality, safety and outcomes 
• Being visible and having a voice 

Looking after our people – we will look after the health and wellbeing of our people and prioritise work-life balance. 

We will look after the health and wellbeing of our people, ensuring we continuously improve the experience of working in the NHS for everyone. 

• We commit to being a workplace which actively supports self-care and helps people to look after themselves. 
• We recognise that different people need to recover from the pandemic in different ways and we will enable this. 
• Staff safety will always remain our priority. 
• We commit to creating a workplace which supports work-life balance and helps people manage conflicting demands more effectively. 
• We will enable managers and colleagues to work flexibly, in a way which is appropriate to their role and which meets the needs of our service users.

Belonging in the NHS – we will create an inclusive, compassionate culture which addresses inequalities. 

We are committed to building greater inclusivity, to build the right culture for our people and our service users. We want to enable every person working in Solent NHS Trust to feel able to bring their authentic selves to work each day, ensuring we all feel visible and our identity is validated and valued. As part of our commitment, we will proactively embed effective diversity and inclusion practices across the Trust. 

• We will develop an inclusive, compassionate culture, creating a sense of belonging and addressing inequalities. 
• We will support and empower under-represented employees, making sure no one is disadvantaged through lack of reasonable adjustment to workplace practices and support, especially in recruitment and opportunities for growth. 
• We commit to creating an environment in which people have an impact on decisions and actions that affect their roles. 
• We will create an inclusive workplace where people feel listened to and empowered. 

New ways of working – we are committed to embedding new ways of working and delivering care. 

We are committed to embedding new, agile ways of working and delivering care and we will adopt innovations which make best use of employees’ skills and experience, to benefit our service users. 

• We will create and implement a digital workforce strategy to help people work effectively. This will provide more intuitive systems – improving our users’ experience, reduce duplication, improve data quality and support effective decision making. 
• We will develop skills and expand capabilities to maximise flexibility and the wellbeing of staff, through learning how to manage teams flexibly, develop greater understanding of wellbeing and widen career development opportunities for our teams. 

Growing for the future – we will develop a workforce which is sustainable for the future. 

We will take steps to sustainably increase the size and resilience of our workforce, to ensure we are able to deliver high-quality, safe, effective care for generations to come. Our focus is on the retention of critical skills, talent management, recruitment and succession planning. 

• We will develop a local workforce supply plan with a focus on both recruitment and retention. 
• We commit to improving collaboration between employers across the ICS to increase overall workforce supply and enable health and care staff to work across the Hampshire and Isle of Wight system, where this makes sense. 
• We will develop our people by ensuring the right amount of clinical placement capacity is available, enabling students to qualify and postgraduates (medical and dental) to follow training recovery plans. 
• We will provide employment opportunities to the workforce of the future, identifying paths for students and school leavers to follow. 

Digital and data transformation – we will improve the experience of staff and service users by implementing digital solutions which optimise existing practice, innovate new practice and enable effective decision making through excellent data and business intelligence.

As part of our ambition to be a digitally-mature organisation where services adapt and respond to the needs of local communities and service users to deliver the best evidenced outcomes: 

• We will develop our data quality and business intelligence maturity to ensure effective measurement of meaningful outcomes and enable informed decision making which supports innovation and improvement. 
• We will simplify and improve the design and operation of our digital solutions, learning from innovations during the pandemic and ensuring consistency and clarity to enable new ways of working and release time to care. 
• We will improve the usability, support experience and learning experience of the digital tools available to our people and our service users, to build digital competencies and optimise use of digital solutions. This will help us improve productivity, data quality and service user experience. 
• We are committed to embedding a culture of continuous digital improvement, where there are clear, easy ways to turn good ideas from our people and service users into innovative new ways of working. 
• We will work with our partners across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight to ensure our digital solutions benefit from shared learning and interoperability to enable consistent, joined-up services for our communities.

Green NHS – we will be smarter in how we use resources when delivering high quality healthcare, so that we are environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. 

The health of our communities is dependent on a healthy environment. All public sector organisations have a significant impact on the environment. While we have made progress to reduce our impact, we have a collective responsibility to do more. 

• We will be smarter in how we use resources when delivering high quality healthcare, so that we are environmentally, economically and socially sustainable. Our Green Plan sets out how we deliver this. 
• By working together, we will ensure that we are helping create the best future environment for our community, service users and staff whilst supporting the wider environmental challenges being faced. 
• We are committed to setting the leadership standard, where we can. 

Supportive environments – we will ensure our built environments provide best value whilst enabling and supporting changes in healthcare delivery and responding to the needs of the population. 

To deliver effective care we will invest in fit for the future flexible, supportive healthcare environment 

• We will respond to the learning from the pandemic and the significant and increasing demand for physical space within our estate by offering fit-for-purpose flexible work spaces. 
• We are committed to working with our partners to deliver high quality, high value buildings effectively. We will work in partnership to deliver large-scale capital programmes of change, where it makes sense to do so. 
• We will respond to the needs of the population by providing built environments which offer best value, and enable and support changes in healthcare delivery. 

Partnerships and added value – we will work effectively with partners to address unwarranted variation, deliver social value, improve NHS and community sustainability and ensure effective use of resources.

By working together with our partners we will plan and deliver services which offer best value for money, deliver social value and improve NHS and community sustainability. 

• We will work with internal stakeholders and partners across the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care System to develop business opportunities which bring income into the Trust and support sustainability of the system. 
• We will seek opportunities to develop innovative new strategic partnerships which support delivery of the Trust vision and Hampshire and Isle of Wight aims. 
• We will use evidence, data and business intelligence to inform strategic planning decisions across the HIOW ICS with the aim of increasing collaboration and reducing unnecessary competition, while ensuring value for money for the taxpayer. 
• As an anchor institution, we are committed to delivering social value through our commercial and procurement activities to help our communities manage and recover from the impact of the pandemic, tackle economic inequality and improve the health and resilience of local people and businesses. We will ensure social value is a core element and explicitly evaluated in our procurement processes and support activities which create local employment, support the physical and mental health of local people, increase local supply chain capacity and tackle inequality in employment.