Annual priorities 2018/19

Our priorities

Every year, we produce a Quality Account to demonstrate how well we are performing as a Trust around three measures - safer care, high quality care and patient experience.

This year, we have identified four main quality improvement priorities which we would like to be our main focus for 2018/19. We want to ensure they are meaningful and achievable and so would like to hear your views about them and also if there is anything else that you believe we should focus on in the year ahead.

The priorities are only draft at this stage and your answers to this questionnaire will help to determine the final safety and quality priorities we set.

The survey, which closes on 31st December 2017, is completely anonymous. However, should you wish to speak to anyone regarding any aspect of our services, please contact us by emailing ch-tr.hearforyou@nhs.net or calling 020  8401 3000.

Thank you very much for taking the time to give us your thoughts and helping us to improve our care for the people of Croydon.



Priority one – To improve our support and care for people with mental health conditions

Croydon University Hospital sees approximately 200 patients a month with mental health conditions. They typically attend through the Emergency Department and are looked after by multi-agency Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), the Working Adult Mental Health Service or the Older Age Mental Health Service. Last year this was a priority for the Trust and the support for mental health patients continues to be a priority. Going forward, we want to focus on improving the experience of our patients and service users by ensuring we give everyone the best possible care through:

•​Early identification with patients who have a mental health condition

•​Development of new standards for health professionals when treating patients with mental health conditions

•​Development of a single point of referral for patients with mental health needs

•​Improve shared use of IT for communications between different organisations

•​Provide a telephone hot line for GPs to access advice about crisis management

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* 1. Do you think this should be a key priority for the Trust?

Priority two – To create a culture of safety, shared learning and listening to our patients and service users

Feedback from our patients and service users is so important to help us continuously improve our care and services. It is also crucial that we learn from any incidents that occur, and from the compliments and complaints that we receive so that we can spread best practice from one team to the next, and take action to improve our care where it is needed.

This includes:

• Improving on how we receive and act on real-time patient feedback
• Increasing the number of ‘no harm’ and ‘low harm’ incidents reported so that we can learn from them and reduce the number of incidents classed as ‘moderate harm’ or above 
• Ensuring that the lessons learned from any serious incidents are shared widely across the Trust to improve safeguards and embed best practice
• Continuing to improve our performance on delivering Harm Free Care (this includes pressure ulcers, falls, catheter infections, venous thromboembolism (VTE) and medication errors)
• Celebrating success and implementing learning from excellence and from ‘always’ events
• Implementing and embedding the nursing, quality, experience and safety strategies

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* 2. Do you think this should be a key priority for the Trust?

Priority three – Reducing the number of incidents involving violence against staff

Each year the number of incidents involving violence and aggression against our staff is increasing. The Trust has a zero tolerance policy. The Trust would like to make this a priority and reduce the number incidents by:

•​Improved communication on zero tolerance against violence towards staff

•​Provide staff with advanced training skills on how to deal with difficult situations

•​Investigate all incidents of violence and aggression towards staff

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* 3. Do you think this should be a key priority for the Trust?

Priority four - Improving the ways patients and service users access our care

Our patients access our care in many ways and we want to have a standardised approach and a streamlined pathway as this will ensure patients can get to the right place at the right time. This is particularly important because we have a new Emergency Department due to open in 2017 and we want to ensure that people are not automatically coming through the department if they don’t need A&E care. We plan to focus on the following areas in particular.

•​The impact of opening our new Emergency Department - due to open in 2018 and how we communicate effectively with the public about the services it provides and where is most appropriate for their needs

•​Improving access for direct GP referrals so family doctors can directly refer patients to appropriate clinicians so they can be assessed quickly

•​Enhancing our care for early pregnancy/ miscarriage to ensure that women receive specialist care and early intervention at the earliest opportunity

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* 4. Do you think this should be a key priority for the Trust?

About you

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* 5. Please tell us a little bit about your self – you can select any that apply to you

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* 6. Are there any other areas you would like the Trust to focus on?

Your views are important to us.

Thank you very much for taking the time to give us your thoughts and helping us to improve our care for the people of Croydon.

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