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Our Vision

Information on our trust vision and strategy

Our vision at Warrington and Halton Hospitals is to be the most clinically and financially successful integrated health care provider in the mid-Mersey region.

We deliver this through our Quality, People and Sustainability (QPS) framework.

Our trust has come a long way over the last few years. We have performed well clinically and financially. Waiting times have been slashed, we’ve reduced infections by over 90%, reduced mortality rates, improved safety measures, achieved NHS Foundation Trust status and seen a wide range of new state-of-the-art facilities opened to provide first class NHS care to the people of Warrington, Runcorn, Widnes and the surrounding areas.

Nationally, it promises to be a period of change for the NHS in difficult economic times. We want to be in a position to continue to grow our services and take opportunities to provide our care in new ways for the benefit of our patients.

We're now looking to the next five years and we've set out our five year plan to deliver the future for our hospitals in our creating tomorrow's healthcare today strategy - launched in Autumn 2014. We’ve called our future strategy creating tomorrow’s healthcare today because that is what we are doing at Warrington and Halton Hospitals - creating a sustainable organisation for the future that will deliver what our local population needs from their NHS hospital services.

You can read about creating tomorrow's healthcare today here

Based on feedback from our governors, members, patients, staff and the public we developed the QPS framework for helping us to deliver our longer term vision in 2012 – 2013. It is underpinned by a range of improvements that we want to deliver to further improve our services. QPS is a simple framework to helpus achieve in three key areas that are important to patients and staff alike. These are quality, people and sustainability. It helps us to focus our work and shape our plans for the future.

The three elements of QPS are:

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Each area has a remit of work, backed by targets and improvements we want to see. For example, quality is underpinned by real improvements like reductions in infection, pressure ulcers and falls; people by improvements in how our staff perceive us, how we engage with staff and reductions in sickness; and sustainability by improvements in our role in the community, governance standards and having stable finances.

There are challenges to making this work and QPS is underpinned by a major transformational change programme in the trust looking at key challenges and priorities. All NHS trusts have to make efficiency plans and savings each year (known as cost improvement programmes or CIP). At our trust we need to save around £12 million in efficiency savings in 2014-2015 (the NHS year runs like the financial year from April 1st to March 31st) and have a wide range of schemes in place to help us to achieve this target.

We are looking further with some transformation of how the trust works in key areas. For 2013-2014 and beyond there were three key areas of change identified by staff and patients as well as external partners and NHS priorities. They aim to deal with some of the challenges that we face and opportunities that we have.

  • Emergency Care Reform – Allowing us to better deal with demand on our front end services. This included a £1.4 million new investment in our ‘front-end’ A&E and emergency admission services in terms of extra space and staffing to allow us to better manage the demand on A&E and emergency/acute medicine.
  • Elective Care Reform – Making best use of the two hospital sites and balancing elective and emergency care. This includes changing the way we provide what we call elective care (planned care like surgery that you know you need in advance) and non-elective (emergency care) across our two main hospital sites. This includes moving more of our routine surgery to Halton General Hospital so that we can focus on emergency care at Warrington Hospital. We also acquired the Cheshire and Merseyside Treatment Centre building on the Halton campus to increase our surgical base.
  • Community Care Reform – Looking at our role in helping prevent patients needing hospital admission and improving discharge. This includes speeding up the development of community based services that reduce the dependency on acute hospital care for patients. It includes a focus on improved mental health service support for patients in hospital, better discharge, admission avoidance for patients in nursing and care homes and providing more of our services in the community.

Although these are the three main priorities that have been identified, there are a number of other transformational change projects. These include projects around Information Technology and developing different approaches, processes and behaviour to enable us to better support our vision. The hospital is moving to wireless and paperless working - allowing more efficient services and more time for staff to spend with the patient.

Our aim is that you will see the real benefit of these changes that will help us to deliver on our vision.

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