The Humber Acute Services Programme is a hugely complex and ambitious programme of work but with a very simple aim – to improve the lives and livelihoods of our population.
Across the whole of the Humber region, we want to provide the best possible health and care services, we want people to be able to access the help and advice they need when they need it, and we want to put in place the right services locally to ensure people only go into a hospital when they absolutely have to.
We want to create new jobs and career opportunities through our investment – jobs in health and care as well as jobs in research, digital, engineering and construction (to name a few). And we are working with a range of partners to help ensure our local people have the right skills to take up these opportunities when they arise.
To deliver such ambitious plans, however, we need to start with what our local population is telling us so we can ensure the changes we make are the best ones for the people who live here, within the very real constraints that we face. To help us with this, we started our work by asking patients, staff and members of the public what was most important to them when thinking about care in hospital. We asked about what matters most because we want to pay particular attention to the things people have told us are most important when we look at how we might provide services differently in the future.
When we compare the different ways of organising our services (known as the options appraisal stage of our change process), we will look to prioritise those options which make the biggest improvements to those areas people have told us matter most.
We heard through this engagement that being “seen and treated as quickly as possible” was most important across the board. The feedback so far tells us that we need to pay particular attention to the current challenge of long waiting lists, particularly in those services most adversely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. In our longer-term plans we also need to be designing services that can see patients quickly and efficiently and can withstand any future shocks.
You can read the findings in full in our survey feedback report or read a short summary on our website.
This process of listening will continue throughout our change programme so we can continue to respond to what people are telling us is most important and take these factors into account when designing ways of providing care in the future. We are continuing to ask the What Matters to You question within all our engagement activities and will continue to listen to feedback. If you didn’t get a chance to complete the survey the first time around, you can take part today.