STRUCTURE:The leader of a provider recently granted foundation trust status has said that the organisation has been presented with an ‘exciting’ opportunity to push forward with new models of care outlined in the NHS Five Year Forward View.

Nottinghamshire Healthcare Trust completed the FT process earlier this month. Chief executive Ruth Hawkins told HSJ this meant the provider could now take forward the new care models “agenda”.

Ruth Hawkins, CEO of Nottinghamshire Healthcare Foundation Trust

Ruth Hawkins said different counties will have to implement the forward view in different ways

The trust was named by NHS England as one of the vanguard sites providing enhanced heath in care homes last week.

Ms Hawkins, whose organisation provides mental health, learning disability and community services, suggested that having a council of governance, a requirement for all FTs, would better enable engagement with local patients in shaping future services.

She said: “We’re already working in partnership with some of our partners in the local health economy around some of the new models of care.

“We think there’s opportunity really in terms of new organisational forms that actually will help take some of that agenda forward, which as an NHS trust we might not have been.”

“We’re quite excited about the opportunities around having the council of governance - really engaging the wider public, not just the people who are directly affected by our services, in terms of how we shape services going forward.”

Ms Hawkins also emphasised that while there was not a county-wide approach to developing some of the new models of care locally, Nottinghamshire Healthcare would work on a case by case basis with local partners.

She said: “If you think about different geographies, we’ve got a lot of clinical commissioning groups in Nottinghamshire and they are all wanting to do slightly different things.

“It’s not like we have got a county approach to actually taking forward the five year forward view.

“We’ve got a number of different approaches, which will require different partnerships with different responses.”

“I think [creating] multispeciality community providers is probably on the agenda within Nottinghamshire with a number of our CCG colleagues but I think it’s not for us about leading but it’s about working in partnership with colleagues in primary care and I think that has to be the way forward.”

Nottinghamshire Healthcare is the first trust providing high security psychiatric services to be awarded foundation status.

Source

Information provided to HSJ

Source date

2 March 2015

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