Community Care

Letter Received from  Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust

As you will hopefully be aware, Buckinghamshire Hospitals NHS Trust is responsible for providing a range of planned, specialist and emergency healthcare services for the population of Buckinghamshire and beyond. These are delivered from three hospital sites – Amersham, Stoke Mandeville and Wycombe.

 Community health services such as district nursing, health visiting and community hospitals are provided by an organisation called Community Health Buckinghamshire, part of Buckinghamshire Primary Care Trust (PCT). Over the past year or so, the Government has directed all PCTs to solely focus on their main role, which is to buy (commission) health services from organisations such as ourselves, on behalf of the local population. Therefore, PCTs are now looking to other organisations to manage their community services.

 I am delighted to inform you that we are one of two organisations (the other being Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust) who have been asked to bid to manage these community services in Buckinghamshire.

 This is an exciting opportunity for the Trust and I believe there is a lot of value that can be added to patient care if we are successful with our bid and able to integrate our hospital services with those in the community.  Hopefully this will provide a more seamless journey for patients who require ongoing treatment or care. In particular, the frail and elderly and patients with long term conditions such as diabetes, rheumatology and respiratory illnesses will be able to receive care closer to home and will not need to come into hospital as often.  Planning and helping patients to be discharged from hospital could also be improved, with better communication and fewer organisations for patients and their relatives/carers to deal with – an area I know our patients feel strongly about. In addition, sharing clinical expertise with community colleagues will help improve outcomes for patients.

 As we already offer a wide range of health services to local patients, we believe that there is a natural link, and it makes good sense for us to manage the community services. I hope that you would agree and I am writing to you to find out your views. As a member, we want to work with you from the very outset to shape and improve how our hospitals and community services could work together in a more integrated way if we were successful in our bid. Your input will be much appreciated and will only take a few moments of your time.

 The deadline for the bid submission is extremely tight as the bid must be submitted by the middle of January. If we are successful, we would be working in a much more integrated way with colleagues in district nursing and managing the community hospitals to help develop a clear pathway for all our patients.  The outcome will be known in the next few months.