Norfolk and Waveney Health and Care Partnership
The population in the East of England is growing and people are living longer, which is putting increasing pressure on the full range of services provided by the NHS. New medical research findings and advances in technology are helping to address this, and QEH with its broad-based volunteer support network has a strong track record in these fields.
The NHS continues to modernise. At a local level, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, King’s Lynn is an anchor institution within the new Norfolk and Waveney Health and Care Partnership, which is the Integrated Care System (ICS) for our part of Norfolk.
ICSs have been created through the government’s Health and Care Bill, which was introduced in Spring 2021. They are the new partnerships between organisations that meet health and social care needs across an area, to coordinate services and to plan in a way that improves population health and reduces inequalities between different groups. The 42 ICSs cover all areas of the country and will be established as statutory bodies in April 2022 with major responsibilities for NHS planning and funding to deliver better and more joined up care.
As a provider organisation, QEH has a key role to play, especially in leading the delivery of Place-Based Care. A ‘Place’ is a geographical unit smaller than an ICS. Places vary widely in their scale and nature, reflecting differences in local geographies, populations, organisational contexts and historical relationships. QEH is working with our wider NHS system partners in West Norfolk, across Norfolk and Waveney and in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire to further improve care and services for the patients we serve and improve the experiences of our staff.
The Norfolk and Waveney Health and Care Partnership includes local health and care organisations such as GP practices, hospitals, community care, social services and mental health teams working together to improve the health, wellbeing and care of over a million people living in Norfolk and Waveney.
The partnership has nine members, but also works closely with our local healthwatch organisations, district councils, the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector and others. The members are:
- NHS Norfolk and Waveney CCG
- James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust
- Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Norfolk County Council
- Suffolk County Council
- Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust
- Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust
- East Coast Community Healthcare CIC
Norfolk and Waveney Hospitals Group
In addition to being an anchor institution within the Norfolk and Waveney Health and Care Partnership (see above), QEH is working as part of a formal ‘provider collaborative’ with the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the James Paget University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. In 2020 the Norfolk and Waveney Hospitals Group Committees (N and WHGC) was established between the three Trusts to enable them to work together to deliver the Trusts’ shared objectives and, where appropriate, align decision making.
Collaborative work has focused to date on key areas including:
- service integration - Urology services across the Norfolk and Waveney region will now be delivered by a single clinical team
- policy convergence and alignment to better support our staff as they work flexibly across sites
- the development of system wide business cases for an Electronic Patient Record and Diagnostic Assessment Centres at the three acute hospital sites in Norfolk and Waveney.