Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust Strategy 2020-2025

Introduction

Peter Coles Trust Chair

Louise Ashley Chief Executive

It brings us great joy to set the strategic direction for Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust over the next five years. Despite the challenging global and national context, we have real hope and a strong ambition for providing outstanding care for our patients and population as well as an outstanding experience for our colleagues. Our 2014-19 Trust Strategy served the organisation well for the past five years and so very much has been achieved that stands us in good stead for continuing our journey to outstanding. We have improved patient outcomes, efficiency and productivity of our services as well as the range of local specialist services we provide by working with partners across the NHS, particularly Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust through the GSTT Healthcare Alliance. The latest specialist service that we are excited to be developing is our stroke service which will provide expert care for local stroke patients. The strategy for the next five years is focused on becoming a learning organisation with continuous improvement at the heart of its culture. We will continuously improve the: • quality of care we provide, improving from a ‘Good’ Care Quality Commission rating to ‘Outstanding’; • engagement, sense of belonging and fulfilment of our talented teams; • management of our finances and how we use our estate; • early adoption and roll out of emerging technologies that support new ways of working and give patients greater ability to manage their health; and, • ways we collaborate with our system partners. At Dartford and Gravesham Trust, we have a highly committed, skilled and diverse workforce that provides care and services of a very high quality which is maintained through our values based interview process, making sure that we are all committed to the same behaviours and expectations.

However, we (as many others do across the NHS) struggle to recruit and retain colleagues.This strategy is focused on improving the experience, wellbeing and engagement of all our colleagues to ensure that they feel valued and that they belong, and actively participate in the decision making at the Dartford and Gravesham Trust. To achieve this we are introducing new ways of working to create a culture of continuous improvement enabled by engagement with our patients, carers and our colleagues. For example, we will be introducing Quality Councils within each Division to hear from frontline colleagues. The Council will choose a specific continuous quality improvement issue to work on together with support from senior management. Evidence suggests that this improves colleagues’s ability to have a strong voice and be involved in delivering the changes they want to see. Webelieve that empoweringour colleagues, valuing diversity and promoting equality and inclusion will improve the overall safety and effectiveness of our services and the experience our patients have. To find out more about this and other initiatives to improve the engagement and wellbeing of our colleagues and our approach to continuous improvement, please read our People and Quality strategies. Our context continues to be one of population growth, an aging population and an increase in long term conditions. We will be workingwith our system partners to tackle health inequalities, provide the right care in the right place and proactively support our population in the management of their health. Unfortunately globally we are also facing an unprecedented infection risk with COVID-19, whilst we have updated the strategy to factor COVID-19 in, it may impact the implementation. We are excited to be continuing our journey to “Outstanding” through this strategy and look forward to delivering it with our partners and monitoring its delivery over the next five years.