Our Annual Plan
The starting point for our annual plan for 2024-25 is our Best Care, Healthy Communities vision, our shared values - caring, open, respectful, responsive and inclusive - and our three strategic objectives – providing safe, high quality care; becoming a great place to work; and delivering integrated care – all underpinned by an ongoing commitment to health equity.
The plan also recognises the progress we made in 2023/24. To give just three examples, all our core services are now rated 'Good' by the Care Quality Commission, our Staff Survey response rate and results improved and we successfully recruited 200 new colleagues as the first step in filling our vacancies.
We now want to build on the progress we made last year but we also understand that the year ahead is likely to be a difficult one. The challenges of reducing waiting times for care and of responding to increasing complexity and acuity of needs will remain with us. 2024/5 will also be a year in which our finances are more constrained that they have been in recent years.
Within our three strategic objectives, the plan sets out a number of deliverable aims for the year:
- Safe High Quality Care – we will establish our Essential Care Framework as the way we support teams to deliver safe high quality care for our patients whilst continuing to reduce waiting times for care plus building our research base and working with communities.
- A Great Place to Work – we will recruit another 200 new colleagues to continue to fill vacancies significantly, reducing reliance on agency staff. We will take forward work in the six priorities we identified from the 2023 Staff Survey. We will also work to make our recruitment process quicker and smoother and act on the Anti-Racism Commitment we made last year.
- Integrated Care – we will continue to work with partners including primary care to establish a successful Community Care Collaborative. We will continue our work to roll our integrated neighbourhood teams and locality hubs to help keep people well at home.
Additionally, our plan commits us to progressing our digital delivery programme and our ‘green plan’, including environmentally conscious capital investment at West Heath and Moseley Hall hospitals. And, as ever, we will work on productivity and efficiency so that we can make the best use of the resources that we have available to us.
Chief executive Richard Kirby said: “In all of these objectives, we will have the best chance of succeeding if we stay true to our values and work together in a way that is compassionate, inclusive and improving.
“2024/5 will not always be easy; but I believe our plan concentrates us on the right objectives and staying true to our values should enable us to continue to make progress together in improving the care we provide to our patients and the support we provide to our colleagues.”