t Quality Account 2022-2023

The Quality Account is an annual account to the public about the quality of services that we provide and deliver, and our plans for improvement. This report is designed to assure our local population, our patients, and our commissioners that we provide high quality clinical care to our patients. The Quality Account includes an assessment of our performance last year and our priorities for the coming year. This document includes indicators to measure our performance against the priorities we had set for 2022/23.

This year’s Quality Account reflects the continued hard work and resilience of our people in helping us to achieve this goal.

The publication of this document is one of the ways in which we can share how we measure the quality of care we are providing to our patients. It includes feedback from our stakeholders on how well they think we have performed.

The Quality Account has been approved for publication by the Quality and Clinical Governance Committee and the Trust Board.

Statement on Quality from the Chief Executive

2022/23 is a year when we have much to be proud of, despite the continued challenges facing the health service. It has been a year since we have continued to see healthcare being transformed through innovation and research. We have also maintained a high quality of care for most of our patients and in July 2022, we received the results of our unannounced Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection which showed that we have maintained our overall rating of ‘Good’. We are particularly proud to have maintained our rating as ‘Outstanding for Caring’ which is a testament to the outstanding and dedicated team of people who work for this Trust.

We are working hard to reduce waiting times for urgent and emergency care. Our community teams have a huge part to play in this by either helping people to stay in their own homes and avoid unnecessary hospital admission or helping them to return home as soon as it is safe to do so. We are also very proud to have opened a new, state of the art, Children’s Emergency Department at the Stoke Mandeville site.

We have continued to prioritise our waiting lists based on clinical needs and those that have been waiting the longest, and colleagues have been working extremely hard to see patients as quickly and safely as possible. Our teams have been working tirelessly to reduce this number and thanks to their efforts over 10,000 people were seen within 10 months. As a result, by March 2023 there were only two patients waiting 78 weeks for treatment and in both cases, this was because of the patient’s choice.

Our clinical teams continue to innovate and offer our patients best-in-class care. For example, we are now able to perform robotic surgery for urology, upper gastrointestinal, colorectal and gynaecology which delivers better outcomes and a shorter recovery time. Our breast unit has also become one of the first in the UK to use an innovative “MagTotal” approach to improve the surgical process for treating some breast cancers. Our school nursing team has introduced new digital resources to extend their reach to all young people across Buckinghamshire who need health support and the ‘Hospital at Home’ programme is delivering hospital-level care in a patient’s own home.

The current cost of living crisis is widening the gap in health inequalities in the most deprived areas of our county. Buckinghamshire’s response to the ‘Levelling Up’ agenda, Opportunity Bucks, officially launched in 2022 and the Trust is proud to be part of this extremely important programme which brings together the expertise and resources of multiple organisations in the county, including local authority, health, and the voluntary sector, to focus on improving the lives and living conditions of the most vulnerable in our communities.

This year has shown yet again the resilience of our colleagues and we would like to take this opportunity to extend our gratitude to them, our volunteers, and our partner organisations, for their continued dedication to delivering healthcare services for our patients and service users. One of our main priorities is to continue to look after the health and wellbeing of our colleagues so that they can provide the best possible care to our patients and service users. We are pleased that this focus was recognised in our most recent national staff survey results, which showed an improvement in the proportion of colleagues feeling ‘my organisation takes positive action on health and wellbeing’.
In this year’s Annual Quality Account, we set out in more detail how we have been working towards achieving our vision of delivering outstanding care from our hospitals to people’s homes, playing our part to create healthy communities across Buckinghamshire, and ensuring this Trust is a great place to work.

To the best of my knowledge, the information contained in this document is an accurate and true account of the quality of the health services we provide. I would like once again to thank our staff for continuing to deliver compassionate and outstanding care for our patients during another challenging year.