Annual report u accounts 2023-24
Trust Annual Report, Accounts and Opinion for April 2023 – March 2024
Foreword from the Chair and Chief Executive
In the financial year that we celebrated not only the 75th birthday of the NHS but also the 80th anniversary of the founding of the National Spinal Injuries Centre, there has been much to be proud of.
At the start of the year, we set ourselves a number of key objectives that, if achieved, would make a real difference to the Trust achieving its vision of delivering outstanding care, creating healthy communities and being a great place to work.
In providing Outstanding Care we set out a goal to eliminate ‘corridor care’ for our emergency patients by 2025 and whilst we’ve not yet done it completely, it is significantly down from where it was in 2022/23. We wanted to have fewer than 4% of patients who attend our Emergency Department (also known as A&E) waiting over 12 hours – in March we achieved 3.42%. Whilst we didn’t quite get to the national standard for the 4-hour target, we saw improvements in all of our other supporting measures, such as reducing delayed discharges, reducing length of stay in our acute and community hospitals and increased admission avoidance through our same day emergency care services.
By both increasing capacity and using the capacity we have more effectively, we reduced the number of people waiting over 65 weeks on a hospital waiting list from 782 in March 2023 to 13 by the end of March 2024. We also met the national standard for diagnosing 75% of new cancers within 28 days of referral and we’ve over halved the number of people waiting over 6 weeks for a scope, scan or hearing test.
The number of teams having their clinical services successfully accredited has exceeded the target we set at the start of the year.
In contributing to our Healthy Communities, we made great progress on some of the goals we set ourselves – reducing the levels of women smoking in pregnancy to below 5% and getting much better at identifying frailty in our hospitals and in the community. We’ve also become one of the first trusts in the country to provide new cholesterol reducing drugs to some of our highest need residents, and our adult community teams continue to perform well above the national standards in responding to people in need at home. We also opened our first ‘health on the high street’ unit in Aylesbury.
We were delighted to once again be awarded the contracts to provide community services for children in Buckinghamshire and made real headway in being more responsive to what nationally and locally are some really challenging increases in complexity in children’s care. And of course, we continue to protect the county’s children through the thousands of vaccinations our childhood immunisation team carry out each year.
Under the goal of making BHT a Great Place to Work, we met our objective for reducing to under 12% the number of colleagues who leave us within a year of joining and the Trust’s vacancy rate is at its lowest ever at under 5%. We have also completed more training in a single year than ever before. Results from the annual national staff survey showed that we are continuing to make good progress nationally and our staff engagement score increased again, putting us in the top quartile compared to similar trusts in the country and we are the fourth best nationally for the positive action we are taking to support the health and wellbeing of our colleagues.
And finally, our Financial Plan – we delivered what we set out to do at the start of the year, including over £20million of efficiencies from where we were last year. On top of this we spent £59m in capital projects including the opening of a new Children’s Emergency Department, digitising the surgical pathway, creating a new digital Care Coordination Centre which gives our clinicians real-time data about the patients in our hospitals, and improving the infrastructure of our estate.
All of this was achieved despite several periods of industrial action during which we continued to provide safe and compassionate care to the residents of Buckinghamshire.
We have much to look forward to in 2024/25. We opened a state-of-the-art Interventional suite in April 2024 and work is underway to install a further new MRI and CT scanner in a purpose-designed modular building at Amersham.
A new 21 bedded ward will open at Stoke Mandeville Hospital this Winter, we will be creating a centre of excellence for ophthalmology as well as expanding our research and innovation facilities. We will also be continuing our digital journey, implementing our Electronic Patient Record, looking for opportunities to use Artificial Intelligence and rolling out new maternity and digital prescribing systems.
None of this could be achieved without the 6,300 colleagues that work for the Trust, our volunteers and our partner organisations and we would like to take this opportunity to extend our gratitude to them for their continued dedication to delivering healthcare services for our patients and service users in our hospitals, in the community and in people’s own homes.