Trust wins award for work with network to support planning and service improvement across the NHS
Nottinghamshire Healthcare was delighted to win a Contribution to the Network Award at the NHS Benchmarking Network celebration event recently.
NHS Benchmarking Network is a member community of health and social care providers and commissioners, and like-minded organisations. They deliver national and bespoke benchmarking projects to support planning and service improvement across the acute, community, and mental health, learning disabilities and autism sectors.
The award was given to the Trust for its extensive support of the work of the network.
Our services have hosted NHS Benchmarking Colleagues to shadow teams, to enable them to develop their understanding of the service portfolio for which they collect data on. Seeing a service firsthand and hearing from the service leads and those working in the service provides invaluable insight into the challenges and requirements of the service. Many of the individuals the network engage with are performance, business intelligence or finance colleagues, so direct engagement with clinical teams provides insight to the services.
The Trust through its clinical services and corporate teams, participate and attend the Benchmarking Network Annual Workshops and Conferences, enabling us to network and make contacts with other Trust provider colleagues. Clinicians are invited to participate in reference groups which scope the annual project specification, allowing the benchmarking projects to be more meaningful and relevant. Colleagues from our Community Health Services were involved in the scoping of the first Virtual Ward project specification. Virtual wards, also known as hospital at home, allow patients to get the care they need at home safely and conveniently, rather than being in hospital.
The Trust is also a member of the national Community Health Services Reference Group which plans the annual benchmarking exercises. Being part of the group provides an opportunity to influence the annual national programme of benchmarking project areas.
Each Year we participate in several core projects organised by the Benchmarking Network - The Trust partakes in the Community Services project providing a unique data set unavailable elsewhere in the NHS. We compare investment and performance for several different community services mental health, CAMHS, adult and older people, community forensics, learning disabilities, community district nursing, children's nursing services, health visiting. The projects provide benchmarking analysis across the following areas: service access, activity, clinical time profiles, workforce, finance, quality.
The networks vision is to enable members to improve patient outcomes, raise health standards and deliver quality health and care services through data excellence, benchmarking and the sharing of innovation.