Account of the Quality of Clinical Services

North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) is one of the largest trusts in the country providing hospital and community services to the people of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset. In addition, specialist services are provided to a larger population in the South West of England and in some instances, at a national and international level.

The Trust provides hospital services at Southmead and Frenchay, children’s community health services for South Gloucestershire and Bristol, and from April 2011, adult community health services in South Gloucestershire.

The Trust works in close partnership with Primary Care Trusts and GPs, local councils and community organisations, to ensure our services are of the highest quality and meet the needs of people in our community.

NBT has approximately 9,500 staff and 1,140 hospital beds.

In 2010/11, the Trust provided the following:

• 116,000 inpatient episodes
• 450,000 outpatient episodes
• 84,500 patients treated in the emergency department
• 6,000 babies born with help from our maternity service

The quality of the estate of the two hospitals is mostly poor. In 2010 building work began on our new hospital on the Southmead Hospital site which will incorporate the majority of inpatient services provided by the Trust within a state of the art building, due to open in spring 2014. Improving quality and safety has been central to the design. The 800-bed hospital will have more single en-suite rooms than any other NHS hospital in the country, greatly improving privacy and helping to control the spread of infections. Care for the most seriously-ill patients will be improved with more intensive care and high-dependency beds.

On 1 April 2011 NBT became responsible for South Gloucestershire Community Health Services (SGCHS) and our expectation is that we will work with this new team in setting objectives that contribute to overall Trust priorities, such as reducing pressure ulcers, and to ensure they have effective processes and baseline measures to show improvement. As with our other directorates, SGCHS will set its own local priorities for quality improvement.

NBT is proud of the quality of care and treatment it provides to patients. This high quality is achieved because of the expertise and commitment of the Trust staff.

The Trust has a long standing commitment to improving the quality and safety of its services. In 2007 it was enrolled in the second phase of the Safer Patient Initiative, a 2 year programme funded by the Health Care Foundation. We have continued to build on this work and over the last year have been an active participant of the South West Quality and Safety Improvement programme. This work has enabled us to continue with our commitment to continue to reduce our mortality rates (HSMR) to one of the lowest in the country.

Our Quality Account provides an interesting overview of the quality and safety work of the Trust and how we are focused on our 2011-12 priority areas of:

• Preventing deterioration
• Falls
• Pressure ulcers
• Nutrition screening

Download Account of the Quality of Clinical Services 2010 – 2011 (PDF).