This year, over Easter, our Trust will be joining in with the National Breaking the Cycle initiative. This is all about putting patients first by prioritising the services and activities that support safe and timely care and being responsive to delays and pressures in the system. (Our CEO Owen Williams has already referred to this in his welcome in this issue).

 If you would like some more information about the initiative you find it on the NHS England website at http://www.england.nhs.uk/resources/resources-for-ccgs/breaking-the-cycle/.

We will be continuing with the schemes that proved to be most beneficial for patients during Our Perfect Week in January 2015. These include the bed turnaround team and transport for discharge. In addition we will be focussing our attention on discharge planning in light of the Care Act 2014 which has been introduced from 1st April this year.

We know we can make improvements to our discharge planning across the hospitals and we have been working closely with community health and social services to look at how we can prevent delays associated with transfers of care.

During April and May 2015 we will be working in partnership to implement some changes and to standardise the way we do things. The first stage is to ensure that patients receive information about moving on from hospital when they are admitted.  

We will be sending regular messages out over this period this so please look out for updates.

iHub Project Manager, Joe Minton