Developing the strategy of QVH

Queen Victoria Hospital is the second smallest trust in the country, and whilst we provide excellent care for patients, we need to ensure that our hospital is sustainable for the long term.

Since the decision was made not to proceed with merger, we began a journey to develop our strategy for the future, one that would be clear about who we are as an organisation, what we want to be, and what our patients, staff, stakeholders and the wider NHS want and need us to be.

We have much to be proud of as an organisation with some of the best patient feedback in the country. We began a programme of engagement work in April 2023 where we asked staff, patients, former patients, external stakeholders and anyone with an interest in QVH to tell us what their hopes, fears and ideas were for our future. We heard from more than 1,850 people through meetings and an online survey which generated over 3,000 pieces of feedback which has now been independently analysed.

What was clear is that people think our strengths lie in our patient-centered care, specialised services, dedicated staff, our place and services in the community as well as our commitment to ongoing improvement. But we know we have challenges we need to address to ensure our long-term clinical, operational and financial sustainability.

Now is the right time for us to refine our thinking, using the feedback, data and service led analysis, to inform us.

At our Public Board on Thursday 11 January 2024, our Board reached a significant milestone when we discussed a number of opportunities QVH has for its strategic direction. The discussions considered the context that we operate in and the need to make sure we have a clear identity going forwards – so we know both what we are and what we are not.

The paper we discussed in public set out five options:

1. Do nothing
2. Become a specialist provider, losing our community facing services
3. Become a generalist provider, stopping specialist work
4. Become a community provider, stopping specialist work
5. Become a hybrid provider, building on our specialist/regional services and becoming an active local partner with an innovative neighbourhood offering.

The board supported option 5 as the preferred possibility for us. This will mean we can retain our highly specialised services whilst offering an innovative health and care offering to the local community. It gives us the chance to strengthen our clinical research output, develop collaborative partnerships and really build on our role as an anchor institution for East Grinstead, where our long-term sustainability is tied to the people we serve both as patients and staff. Importantly this option gives us the opportunity to deliver clinical, operational and financial sustainability. At this point no changes to services are being made.

This is very much the first step in our strategy development journey. One of our engagement commitments is to be transparent and we will continue to post updates through to the launch of the strategy in the autumn.

Page created: 16 January 2024.