Business Plan
Summary of Trust Annual Business Plan 2016/17
Our Operating Plan for 2016/17 sets out our key priorities for the coming year. It reflects increasing levels of demand and current operational pressures and sets out how we expect to work with our national and local partners to significantly improve our deficit from £48m.
The Trust has a long standing commitment to improving the quality and safety of its services. Our aim is to provide high quality and safe care for every one of our patients, in every service and every time it’s needed. However, there is more to do. We know that patient experience is variable between services and between different episodes of care and that we are yet to reach reliability across all of our quality of care measures.
Our vision is that we will realise the great potential of our organisation by our skilled and caring staff delivering innovative, high quality services in state-of-the art facilities. This will ensure excellent clinical outcomes and an outstanding experience for our patients.
This is embodied in a new five year Trust strategy which sets out eight strategic themes. These are:
- Change how we deliver services to generate affordable capacity to meet the demands of the future
- Be one of the safest Trusts in the UK
- Treat patients as partners in their care
- Create an exceptional workforce for the future
- Devolve decision making and empower frontline staff to lead
- Maximise the use of technology so that the right information is available for the key decisions
- Enhance patient care through research
- Play our part in delivering a successful health and care system.
The Trust Board approved the annual business plan in March 2016. The financial plan for the year was to achieve a deficit of £48m after the achievement of £22m of savings. To deliver the financial plan the following improvements will be required through the actions identified through operational and workforce improvement plans. This includes:
- ensuring our income can deliver the activity we have planned to achieve
- reducing the temporary workforce expenditure on areas such as sickness absence and recruiting to vacancies
- and reducing the amount we spend on agency staff.
The local population is growing without the equivalent rise in funding to support it, so it is estimated that by 2020 there will be a significant shortfall across the local health economy unless there is greater investment in prevention and more integrated care in the community.
To address these challenges, and as part of emerging wider plans for Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG), we are committed to more partnership working. This includes being fully supportive of the BNSSG Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP) and ensuring the aims of this plan are aligned with the Trust strategy. The local system has a strong track record of transformational change and these plans will ensure this work continues.
However, the STP recognises that BNSSG is a challenged health economy both financially and in operational performance with particular concerns about the changes to some of our acute partner provision and the knock-on impact at both Bristol hospitals. There are also issues with the capacity and capability of community provision, primary and social care to meet the population health need in a way that ensures the hospitals are able to concentrate on the work in which they add most care to patients.
It is clear that the Trust has set out an ambitious plan to achieve financial stability whilst continuing to provide the excellent services that our patients expect and demand. We are confident though that whilst there are clearly still challenging times ahead this plan will set us on the right path over the next few years that would ensure the Trust’s financially challenged position is returned to viability.