Thank you BOB ICB

Thank you . . .

NHS BOB ICB

Celebrating 75 years of our NHS and one year of our BOB ICB

Foreword

As we celebrate NHS at 75 years, we also mark the first year of Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West (BOB) ICB. The ICB has come a long way in our first year and our value to the system is clearly visible. This is shown through the adoption of our BOB Integrated Care Partnership Strategy, the establishment of our place partnerships, our growing relationship with our voluntary, community and social enterprise partners, the development of our Joint Forward Plan and of course the on-going delivery of the COVID-19 vaccination programme. During the period 1 July 2022 to the end of June 2023, over 826,645 vaccinations have been given across the BOB area – with nearly five million given since the start of the programme.

At this time of celebrating the 75th anniversary of the NHS it is right that we also reflect and I would like to use this opportunity to recognise your contribution to what has been the greatest mass vaccination programme in history.

The ICB started it’s journey on 1 July 2022; while I am joining this journey a year on, I am aware of the great work staff are doing. Whether that’s safeguarding vulnerable children and adults, helping patients better manage their long term conditions, bringing hospital care into people’s homes, tackling health inequalities or providing end of life and palliative care.

This is all achieved through innovation and positive relationships with people across our partnerships. This is the real and valuable work you do.

This photobook shows some of your work and we hope to add to it over the year as we continue our journey.

Thank you NHS BOB ICB.

Nick Broughton Chief Executive Officer, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West ICB

Our Joint Forward Plan

How we will work with our partners across health and care to develop plans to deliver services to people living in BOB.

The Joint Forward Plan outlines how the BOB ICB will work with our partners across health and care to deliver joined up services to people living in BOB over the next five years. The plan is developed by us, the ICB, and our NHS provider trusts across BOB, working closely with local authorities, and voluntary and community organisations.

We have been working closely with stakeholders over the past few months to understand how to deliver health and care services which best meet our population’s needs.

The planning is focused on five key areas:

Promoting and Protecting Health –supporting people to keep healthy and well, with focus on prevention, inequalities, vaccination and immunisation.

Start Well – helping children achieve the best start in life, focusing on maternity services, children’s mental health, children’s learning disabilities, children’s neurodiversity and children with long-term health conditions.

Live Well - supporting people and communities to live happy and healthy lives, with particular interest in long-term conditions, adult mental health, adult neurodiversity and cancer services.

Age Well – enabling people to stay healthy and live independently for longer, looking at frailty and community multidisciplinary teams.

Quality and Access – creating access to the right care in the best place, reviewing primary care, urgent and emergency care, planned care, palliative and end of life care.

You can find out more about the Joint Forward Plan from our health and care partners by watching the video below.

Virtual Wards

NHS Virtual Wards: patients receive hospital level care at home.

Virtual wards are a safe and efficient alternative to hospital allowing patients to get the care, monitoring and treatment they need at home and is often enabled by technology. This prevents either avoidable admissions into hospital or supports an early discharge.

Where patients require visits from multidisciplinary teams the service is often referred to as Hospital at Home.

Across the country, studies have shown virtual wards can deliver similar if not better outcomes for patients such as reducing both admissions to hospital and the risk of ill health brought on by inactivity such as bedrest.

Moreover, with the innovation of virtual wards, we can provide more choice for patients –enabling them to stay home, where many would rather be.

In July 2022, the Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West (BOB) ICS Virtual Wards Programme was established to guide the development and delivery of virtual wards. As agreed with NHS England, we are aiming to deliver 460 virtual ward beds by April 2024 (29 beds per 100,000 of the population), 430 of which are expected to be in place by December 2023.

Within the next five years, we will aim to deliver at least 650 virtual ward beds to meet NHS England’s long-term ambition of ensuring 40 to 50 virtual ward beds per 100,000 of the population are in place across the country.

Across BOB ICS, six providers including acute and community hospital trusts and a GP led service deliver our virtual wards and Hospital at Home services. For the five months from January 2023 to May 2023 we had 4,529 admissions into these services.

However, the number of conditions being supported on our virtual wards is being expanded to include cardiology, respiratory, frailty, palliative/end of life care and clinical infection. This is part of a core offer that providers in each Place across BOB ICS will be delivering by April 2024.*

Dr Syed Hasan, clinical lead for virtual wards at BOB ICB, said:

“Over the past year, virtual wards have supported an increasing number of people to remain in their own homes to receive high quality health care, while allowing other patients to return home sooner from hospital to continue their treatment.

* BOB ICS comprises of three Places: Buckingamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West.

“Virtual wards have reduced the pressure on emergency and acute services by treating these vulnerable patients at home with hospital-level care.

“It’s fantastic that the NHS has celebrated so many achievements over the past 75 years around improving patient care which we all respect and appreciate. Virtual wards are another great example of this innovation and patient centred care that enables the NHS to keep us well and healthy.”

Watch Roger’s story

Roger was able to be discharged from hospital earlier than would have been previously possible to continue his treatment for a hip infection at home by Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust Outpatient Parenteral Antimicrobial Therapy team (OPAT) Hospital at Home service. Roger said:

“The hospital at home nurses have been fantastic and made a big difference to my life and my wife’s. To be treated at home has been an absolute revelation and I received a similar level of care to what I had in hospital.”

Click to watch

COVID-19 Vaccination Programme

Contributing to the greatest mass vaccination programme in history, thank you.

From small independent community pharmacies to stadium-size vaccination centres with military support, since 8th December 2020 healthcare and public sector organisations from across the country have been contributing to the greatest mass vaccination programme in history for COVID-19.

With the ongoing national challenge of building vaccine confidence across all communities, and providing reassurance about safety, it is thanks to local efforts of all our staff that the target of offering the vaccine to all adults across BOB was hit.

As we mark two and half years since the start of the vaccination programme it is right to recognise this extraordinary achievement. From the start, BOB’s ethos was that it could only successfully deliver such an immense programme with the involvement of all its partners.

Since we began vaccinating our local population, and with thanks to the hundreds of NHS workers, local authority staff and volunteers involved in the programme, the vaccination uptake has been consistently high compared with other parts of the UK. And the hard work continues.

The latest spring booster programme has seen more than 23,000 people across our geography booked to have a spring COVID-19 jab during the first week of the NHS’s vaccination programme roll out.

Here is a selection of photos that reflect the humanity and contribution of you all. We can all be very proud of our team efforts which touched so many lives across Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West.

Supporting Urgent Care

Staywell-bob.nhs.uk is our patient facing website which provides information about where to go to the get the right care from across BOB.

On the website you will find information about how and where to seek medical advice and support and there is a useful GP and pharmacy finder to help patients locate services close to home. You will also find videos about a range of health concerns, created by local specialists, GPs and clinicians across the region.

There is a dedicated section with information about how get the right care including information about:

 Self care, pharmacy

 GP practice

 NHS 111

 Urgent care

 Emergency

 Mental health

The website helps outline a patients’ pathway to getting the right care, at the right place and by the right professional and includes clear information on where to seek help.

It also features links to local services that will help you live independently such as home care agencies, or organisations that can help with shopping or gardening. This local services section features a host of links to organisations that can support people to live well.

visiting one of the boxes shown in the image and selecting the relevant link. There is also a a useful downloads section and this offers a range of resources that can be easily printed and downloaded in order to support you and your local community.

Staywell-bob.nhs.uk is a great place to find accurate and trusted NHS healthcare advice and access to local services. All the information on our site aims to offer the best advice for families and carers and we’re regularly adding new topics.

People can also use the site to find out where to go to get a flu and COVID-19 vaccine, by

Improving physical health in people with serious mental illness (SMI)

More and more of our population are living with a serious mental illness (SMI) and many people with mental ill health and also suffer from physical ill health.

The shocking figures are that people with SMI on average have 15 to 20 years shorter life expectancy than the general population. Most of this reduced life expectancy is due to a higher rate of physical conditions such as cardiovascular disease.

There are real opportunities to address this starting with annual physical health checks. Each SMI health check has 6 key physical health indicators:

 Blood pressure

 Weight

 Smoking status

 Alcohol status

 Cholesterol

 Blood sugar

To address the health inequalities, and to improve uptake of healthchecks across BOB, our teams are driving improvements with success.

In January 2023, former WBC Heavyweight Champion Frank Bruno opened Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust’s mental health and wellbeing centre.

The Frank Bruno Centre at Oxford Stadium is home to a Primary Care Mental Health Team which takes referrals from local GPs and improves mental health care for local people. The centre, which is run by local people who have experience of mental health challenges themselves as well as mental health professionals, psychologists, peer support workers and employment experts, is a collaboration between the NHS, including BOB ICB, and is linked to local GP surgeries who will work alongside the Frank Bruno Foundation and Oxford Stadium. The hub is working with up to 2,000 people each month.

Celebrating 75 years of our NHS

NHS Ambassadors Back to School Talks

We have been supporting a campaign to inspire children to consider a career in the NHS. During May this year we invited you to go back to school to talk to children and young people about your job.

BOB ICB careers talks have been inspiring students eager to learn about the broad range of career opprtunities available at the NHS and the many challenging and rewarding roles that strive to improve local health and care services.

Helping to inspire the NHS workforce of the future is something we can all do. The NHS Ambassadors programme connects NHS staff with schools and by talking about your job, you can help to illustrate the connection between what students are studying in the classroom and the potential opportunities available in the NHS, recognising that the service has over 350 different careers on offer.

It’s easy to sign up and by doing so you’ll be helping to inspire the NHS workforce of the future.

Celebrating NHS75 at Westminster Abbey

Seven colleagues joined more than 1,500 NHS, as well as senior Government and political leaders, health leaders and celebrities at a service at Westminster Abbey to celebrate the NHS 75th birthday during the first week of July.

May Parsons, an associate chief nurse who delivered the world’s first vaccine outside of a clinical trial in December 2020, carried the George Cross into the Abbey in a procession. She will be joined by joined by 17-year-old Kyle Dean-Curtis, St John Ambulance cadet of the year, who wants to work in the NHS, and 91-year-old Enid Richmond, who was one of the first people to work in the NHS as a junior clerical worker and whose sister still volunteers in the health service.

The 5 July 2023 marks 75 years of the NHS, and there are many ways you have been helping to get involved . . .

The NHS’s history – key innovations

Since its launch, the NHS across BOB has been at the forefront of world-leading medical advances.

1948 – first spinal injuries unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital is opened and the first competition for wheelchair athletes is named the Stoke Mandeville Games.

1956 – first kidney dialysis performed at Leeds General Infirmary

1960 – first kidney transplant takes place at Edinburgh Infirmary

1978 – world’s first ‘test-tube’ baby born as a result of fertilisation (IVF)

1987 – world’s first heart, lung and liver transplant carried out at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge

1994 – NHS Organ Donor Register set up for people wishing to donate their organs

2008 – vaccine to prevent cervical cancer (HPV) is made available for all schoolgirls

2021 – major milestone in battle against COVID-19 as first Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is delivered at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford in January

2020 – first health system in the world to commit to become carbon net zero

2022 - 5.8 million people in the UK have now received theirt first dose COVID-19 vaccination

The BOB ICB

The All Staff event took place on 29 June in Reading. Hundreds of colleagues across Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West came together for a fantastic celebration of staff achievements. The event gave everyone the chance to reflect on how far we have come as an organisation during our first year.

Thank you for contributing to the workshops that ran through the day and for giving us your feedback, we will be using this to develop future plans to ‘Build a Better BOB ICB’. It a delight to welcome our new interim chief executive Nick Broughton and to listen to his words about commitment to engaging with colleagues as well as highlighting the enormous potential for the future.