South West Regional Social Partnership Forum

Andrew Millward

Director of Private Offices and Communications

10January 2012

The context - NHS South of England

13.4 million people

110 NHS organisations

£21.1bn budget

1,873 GP practices

60 Clinical Commissioning Groups

34 Local Authorities

Our priorities: safety, quality, money

• Improving the quality of care through improved outcomes, patient safety and patient experience

• Ensuring services are delivered within the resources available so that taxpayer value is delivered

• Ensuring the reformed NHS is established and its benefits achieved

• Ensuring strategic issues are addressed in the reformed NHS

• Managing the human consequences of the reform programme and supporting staff through the transition.

The challenge

• Satisfaction in the NHS remains high, but is dropping (70%)

• Patients believe the local NHS provides a good service (77%) but fewer of the general public do so

• With satisfaction dropping, we have a key role to play in maintaining public confidence in the NHS

Source Ipsos MORI December 2010

The communications and engagement opportunities and challenges

• Improve media coverage – as this is the area that can have a big impact on public perception

• Enhance staff communications and engagement• Manage change better – engage with those who

are key to our success

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Very Negative Negative Positive Very Positive

Tone of coverage per region, all mentionsNovember 2011

NHS South West figures are provided by FreshwaterLondon and North West not included from April 2011

Source: Kantar Media Precis

What we will do

• Meet PCT leads and Trust leads to discuss reputation management

• Monthly detailed review of media coverage• Work much more closely to ensure consistent

handling of FOIs etc across four cluster SHAs• Detailed look at reconfiguration and service

change

Staff Engagement Workshops• How we can reverse the downward trend of perception of

the NHS• How we keep up good coverage• How we continue to manage even more challenging service

changes• Implement a single communications and engagement

shared service across South of England for the transition period and support development of a nationwide commissioning support service for post April 2013

TOWARDS A SINGLE COMMUNICATIONS AND ENGAGEMENT SERVICE

Towards a single communications and engagement service

PCT and SHA Clustering

Regional shared serviceApril 2012 – April 2013

Nationwide commissioning support serviceFrom April 2013

The rationale

• We know what our resources look like• We know they are unevenly distributed• We could get better value from our existing

resources • We have an opportunity to do things differently –

and better

How we would work in a more shared way

• Local teams continue providing a local service, supported by a regionwide “virtual” network.

• Minimal movement / change for staff – we only want to restructure once

• Opportunities to work across different or larger geographic areas

• Management arrangements to be put in place.

.

Progress made already• Programme manager identified

• Communications and Engagement Programme Board and Steering Group established

• Communications and Engagement Steering Group established

• Collaborative working already underway

• Plans in place to co-develop Memorandum of Understanding over next two months.