introduction...
What
a Quality Account?
Each year all providers of NHS services are required to publish a report on the quality of the services they deliver. This is called the Quality Account. This Quality Account aims to provide you with information about the quality of the NHS Health services we deliver and our plans to improve further with the needs of services users and their families at the centre of all we do.
Our priorities are to ensure that our services are safe, effective, responsive, caring and well-led. To measure our progress against these priorities, we collect and review a range of information about our services throughout the year, which we report to our Board and our commissioners. We use this information to identify areas of good practice and to find areas for improvement, so that we can maintain and improve the quality of the services we deliver.
We hope you enjoy reading this Quality Account. If you would like to give us your view of our Quality Account, please contact us using the details below.
We are keen to hear from you if you have any views and suggestions on our Quality Priorities for the year ahead or any feedback on any other aspect of the Quality Account presented here. You can contact us by email or by post using the contact details below:
Statement from our Chief Executive
I am proud to present our annual Quality Account to you. It clearly shows how hard our teams have worked to ensure services are safe and of a high quality. It cannot be underestimated how much work goes into designing and implementing service improvements to enhance quality and safety and I would like to thank all our colleagues for the incredible work they do.
Some of the real highlights for me in this report is the feedback we received from service users. It is good to hear when people have positive experiences of our services. Where people have not had such a good experience, we want to make sure we hear them and make changes where we need to improve. In the last year a key concern for service users is of course the waiting times for some of our services. It is something we have been working hard to address but it is a work in progress due to the rising demand for services. Nevertheless, we are committed to continuing our efforts to reduce waiting times in 2024-2025 and our colleagues share this commitment. Our annual colleague engagement survey demonstrates how passionate our colleagues are about delivering good quality safe and effective care.
As in previous years, I have continued to walk the floor, visiting services to speak with colleagues and service users and I continue to be impressed with the compassion and care our colleagues have for the people that use our services. Our colleagues truly do go the extra mile and I can see this in the Quality Account where we have reported on all the initiatives, they have undertaken to live our vison and values. The work on co-producing the Long COVID Service with the people who use our services and the work to support the homeless particularly illustrate this. I have no doubt that 2024-2025 will be a busy and demanding year but I am confident our colleagues will continue to rise to the challenge and deliver high quality and compassionate care.
I hope you enjoy reading this Quality Account and if you have any feedback to give us, we would be pleased to hear from you.
D Mark Heasman Group Chief Executive
About Provide Community
Provide Community is an employee-owned Community Interest Company (social enterprise).
A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose profits are principally reinvested in the business or community rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit. Social enterprises operate in almost every industry in the UK, from health and education to retail and recycling.
We deliver a broad range of health and social care services in the community and are committed to making sure that they are safe, responsive, and high quality. We work from a variety of community settings, such as community hospitals, community clinics, nursing homes, and primary care settings, as well as within people’s homes, to provide more than 40 services to children, families, and adults. We also offer some online services.
Transforming lives
Our Vision, Mission and Values
Our customers are central to everything we do. Transforming lives through care, innovation and compassion is at the heart of our culture and is why our colleagues go the extra mile for the people we serve.
OUR MISSION
An ambitious, employee-owned social enterprise, growing in size and influence. We transform lives by treating, caring and educating people.
Care , innovation and compassion.
OUR VALUES
Process
organisation to ensure the services we deliver achieve the standards of quality and safety required.
The Board has set in place systems and processes including safe premises, safe systems of work, guidance, training, equipment, and leadership to enable colleagues to work safely and effectively. The Board receive regular assurance reports to inform them how the organisation is performing with regards to quality and safety including information on incidents, risks, infection prevention, safeguarding, customer engagement and feedback. The Board takes action, where needed, to address any issues affecting quality and safety.
The Board promotes a “just culture” which supports a culture of fairness, openness and learning where colleagues can feel confident to speak up when things go wrong, rather than fearing blame. The Board has also set in place systems that enable colleagues to speak up (whistleblow) if they are concerned about quality or safety in the organisation. The Board ensures that we respond to incidents and complaints promptly, with openness and honesty, so that we can learn from them and ensure the people affected are supported and receive an apology and explanation when things go wrong.
Our Board members are highly engaged, visible and approachable and enjoy meeting colleagues and service users first hand when they undertake their regular visits to service areas.
Statement from our Board continuous improvement
The Board is committed to ensuring that quality and safety are our highest priority, and that is the byword for everything we do. This includes learning from incidents and listening to what our service users say about our services.
This Quality Account provides a good overview of how we have performed with regards to quality and safety and we are delighted to see how much we have managed to achieve in 2023-2024.
The Board would like to thank all our colleagues who work so hard to deliver on our priorities, ensuring safe and effective care is at the centre of all that we do and that our service users receive the right care and a good experience.
In the year ahead the Board will continue to maintain oversight of our services and will maintain the focus on how we can reduce waiting times and manage service demand and will continue to support our colleagues to thrive in their roles.
Under the Health Act 2009 and the National Health Service (Quality Accounts) Regulations 2010 to prepare Quality Accounts for each financial year our Board are required to ensure that the content of our Quality Account is accurate and presents a balanced picture of the organisation’s performance over the period covered and that the information reported is reliable and accurate and have been prepared in accordance with Department of Health Guidance. On behalf of the Board, I can confirm our Quality Account meets the required standards.
Robert Parkinson Group Chair
our priorities
How the CQC Rates Us
Reporting Against Core Quality Account Indicators
In this section we report on how we have performed against key measures organisations are mandated to report against in their Quality Account. As a community provider, most of the mandated indicators are not relevant but where we can report we have.
Quality Indicators
Colleague Friends and Family Test
ACCURACY OF DATA CORE INDICATOR
Percentage of NHS patent records held which includes NHS number and General Medical Practice Code for a patient’s GP practice.
NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT)
Accuracy of Data
PURPOSE
Recording the NHS number and GP details ensures patients can be identified correctly and receive appropriate treatment and information can be provided to their GP to support continuity of care.
Using this toolkit helps providers measure the quality of the IT data systems, standards and processes used to collect data.
PROVIDE COMMUNITY
Number contacts
524,875
Missing GP Code 32 (0.06%)
Missing NHS Number 12 (0.02%)
Provide Community Rating ‘Standards Exceeded’
Participation in National Clinical Audits
Participation in national audits enables us to measure the quality of the services we provide against other organisations delivering NHS care. This allows us to identify areas where we can improve our services.
Taking Part in Clinical Research and Evaluations
Clinical research and evaluation of clinical care is a central part of the NHS, as it enables the NHS to identify and offer new treatments that improve people’s health. Provide Community promotes participation in research. In 2023-2024 we supported the following Research projects:
RESEARCH AND EVALUATIONS IN 2023-2024
Multiple Interventions for Diabetic Foot Ulcer Treatment Trial (MIDFUT)
Long COVID LISTEN Study
PhD Strength Training in Pulmonary Rehabilitation
Evaluation of Long COVID Services
Drive-ability evaluation
Phase two study to investigate the short-term efficacy of four treatment strategies compared to Treatment as Usual (TAU). Phase three investigates the clinical and cost effectiveness of only two treatment strategies compared to TAU in hard to heal DFU’s.
Clinical Trials Research Unit, Leeds Institute of Clinical Trials Research
Poster advertisement for recruitment only. NIHR
The use and impact of strength assessments and strength training in Pulmonary Rehabilitation: A Qualitative Study with Practitioners and Patients. Research Outcome:
Using ELAROS digital PROM data and other routinely collected outcome data.
Referrals for driving post stroke assessments following a six-month pilot for free driving tests.
ACTIVE STUDIES THAT WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT 2024-2025
Chronic Leg Ulcer Pilot Study
Identification of ‘subclinical’ infection in the deep tissues in Chronic Leg Ulcers – a prospective study.
University of Essex / Provide Community
NHS England
Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative
PhD Study
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Education and Training of Nurse Practitioners in integrated sexual and reproductive healthcare: a qualitative study exploring nurse practitioners’ perspectives on integrated clinics.
Providing recommendations for improving the current weight management services in Essex County to increase their effectiveness.
Mid and South Essex, East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trusts
University of Northampton
University of Essex / Provide Community
OTHER WAYS WE PROMOTED RESEARCH DURING 2023-2024
A monthly research newsletter is shared with all Provide Community colleagues via the internal intranet, Community Platform, and in our internal newsletter, Noticeboard. This newsletter brings information about further development and training opportunities with our partner organisations such as the National Institute of Health Research’s (NIHR) free courses, events and conferences (both online and face-to-face).
We also outline what is new in research and development at Provide Community, eg policies, documents, publications, poster presentations at conferences.
Provide Community won best poster for a Driveability (driving safely after a stroke) Poster which was presented at the UK National Stroke Forum. The poster was produced with colleagues across the Mid and South Essex Community Collaborative (MSECC).
Collaborations: We collaborate with MSECC, the NIHR, Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North Thames. There is a newly established NIHR Research Delivery Network (NIHR RDN) which commenced in April 2024 replacing the Clinical Research Network who we are affiliated with.
We are members of the Community Healthcare Alliance of Research Trusts (CHART) group.
We are interested in co-production with patients/colleagues, future collaborations, facilitating research and evaluation across MSECC – our NHS partner organisations including North East London Foundation Trust (NELFT) and Essex Partnership University Trust (EPUT). We attend three meetings every year with the Mid and South Essex Integrated Care Committee which includes representation from NELFT and EPUT.
Looking Back: Our Priorities for 2023-2024What We Achieved
In our previous Quality Account, we set out our quality priorities for 2023-2024.
In this section we provide an update on what we did to achieve these priorities.
PRIORITY 1:
We will implement the new NHS Patient Safety Incident Response framework (PSIRF) providing a new approach to prevent and manage safety incidents arising from care delivery.
WHAT WE ACHIEVED:
The new PSIRF framework was instigated in October 2023.
We set in place our PSIRF Policy and Plan.
We used this new methodology to support the investigation of incidents using a no blame culture and After Action Reviews to enable colleagues involved in incidents to contribute to the review of the incident and learning achieved.
We rolled out PSIRF training to senior colleagues across our health services and all employees from Board level down have completed the national patient safety training or e-learning appropriate to their role. 100% of the Board completed Board level 1 training. 97% of colleagues completed level 1 training and so far, 89% of colleagues have completed level 2 training.
14 of our senior colleagues completed the NHS England PSIRF training modules.
We have trained 14 colleagues to be After Action Review Conductors to facilitate After Action Review reflection and learning sessions following patient safety events.
We have two designated patient safety specialists currently undertaking the national patient safety syllabus training (level 3 and 4).
We rolled out Freedom to Speak Up (Whistleblowing) training to all colleagues in the organisation to raise awareness and confidence to speak up if they are concerned about safety.
PRIORITY 2:
We will implement the new NHS Infection Prevention Training Framework.
WHAT WE ACHIEVED:
In line with the ambition of the new training curriculum to involve colleagues in more interactive training we have reviewed our corporate induction, and we now include:
Learning how to contribute to infection prevention and control
• How to apply infection control precautions
• Understand the principles of Antimicrobial Resistance and Antimicrobial Stewardship
• How to recognise and act when their personal fitness to work may pose a risk of infection to others
• We explain the hierarchy of controls
• The sessions include group work and videos to provide a range of information to support reducing risks of infection and reminding attendees that ‘IPC is everyone’s business’
• Our colleagues also complete the national skills for health eLearning modules appropriate to role to receive annual updates to their knowledge and skills
We undertake Fit test training face-to-face to ensure colleagues are fitted and know how to use respiratory protective equipment safely and effectively.
Our Infection Prevention Team are highly visible and visit clinical areas regularly to check practice and support learning.
All clinical areas have infection prevention link practitioners that meet regularly with the Infection Prevention Team to develop additional knowledge and skills that they can take back to their clinical areas and cascade to their colleagues.
A new internal intranet page has also been developed by the Infection Prevention Team to provide additional learning and resources to teams.
The Infection Prevention Team provide updates in the internal newsletters to inform colleagues promptly if practice or guidance changes.
PRIORITY 3:
We will review our policy management processes across the Provide Community Group.
WHAT WE ACHIEVED:
The Provide Community Group now has standardised policy templates available and all existing and new policies have transferred to the new templates.
PRIORITY 4:
We will focus on retention of our colleagues by ensuring access to wellbeing resources and getting our structures right to support progression and talent management.
WHAT WE ACHIEVED:
Within the Health Directorate, new Divisional Lead posts have been implemented to provide additional leadership and support to our colleagues.
A new Deputy Director of Nursing was appointed. A new Deputy Director of Allied Health Professionals was appointed. A wide range of wellbeing resources and activities were made available to colleagues as detailed later in this report.
PRIORITY 5:
We will support young people to choose a career in health or social care by extending our school apprenticeship programme and we will provide apprenticeship opportunities specifically for young people leaving care.
WHAT WE ACHIEVED:
We are passionate about promoting a career in health services to young people and participated in the Essex County Council Career events and supported local schools’ career days. We have supported three young people to start apprenticeship roles in our health services in 2023-2024 and have been working closely with the County Council to develop a signposting and applications and support process for care leavers.
PRIORITY 6:
We will review our customer feedback processes across Provide Community to build on our existing processes for gaining feedback from people who use our services, to improve the quality of our services.
WHAT WE ACHIEVED:
We delivered training to our extended leadership team on complaints handling and resolution, focusing on ensuring we listen to concerns and respond in an open and transparent manner when working with people to resolve their concerns. We have developed our friends and family survey to include questions on privacy and dignity and involvement. Where we have been redesigning services, our colleagues have involved service users in the work programmes to ensure changes are co-produced and the lived experience of service users informs the transformation.
Other ways we improved quality and safety in 2023-2024
Schwartz
Rounds
We introduced Schwartz Rounds to the organisation. Schwartz Rounds are a practical tool that health and social care providers can use to improve the culture of their organisation and to support colleagues’ wellbeing and resilience. Schwartz Rounds provide a multi-disciplinary forum that brings together all employees to discuss the non-clinical, social, and emotional aspect of caring for people. Rounds offer a safe confidential environment for colleagues to share their stories and experiences. The underlying premise for rounds is that there is an interwoven relationship between colleagues and service user experiences. It is the experience of health and social care colleagues that shapes service user experiences of care for good or ill, not the other way round. Rounds are designed to provide support for colleagues, aiming to achieve an understanding of each other’s roles, affirming why we come to work, sharing humanity, recognising the impact that work has on us as individuals and enabling the organisation to care for the carers. The sessions are available to all clinical and non-clinical colleagues working for Provide Community, across the Group, through a hybrid model of face-to-face and virtual Rounds on alternate months. Examples of topics covered in Rounds this year include:
When death is not the end
The day I made a difference
Service users who are challenging
When your best doesn’t feel good enough
Our Schwartz rounds have been well attended and feedback from our colleagues has been very positive. One participant reported:
‘When death is not the end’ created a space colleagues needed to share experiences of the coroner’s court - it was one of the most powerful Rounds they have ever been involved in. Everyone was brave, compassionate, open, and transparent. There were no silences to hold and there were stories, tears, and laughter shared. It has set the tone and momentum for our Schwartz Journey ahead.’
Homeless Initiative
In partnership with Primary Care and Sanctus we developed a weekly drop-in clinic for homeless people who are not normally able to access a GP as they have no permanent address. Sanctus is a place where people with no permanent address are able to register a postal address and receive food and warmth throughout the day, every day. By working with Sanctus and a local GP practice, our community matrons formed part of a team that were able to provide assessment and treatment for people who are homeless, and this has enabled them to have access to medications and treatment for long term conditions and shorter-term health issues. Our colleagues have found this to be very positive experience and reported that one service user had said that they felt really happy after the appointment.
Learning from Deaths
In line with the new statutory medical examiner system requirements, we have now set in place a process for reporting deaths that occur in our community hospital inpatient wards to the Medical Examiner.
Medical examiners are trained in the legal and clinical elements of death certification processes. The purpose of the medical examiner system is to: provide greater safeguards for the public by ensuring independent scrutiny of all non-coronial deaths ensure the appropriate direction of deaths to the coroner provide a better service for the bereaved and an opportunity for them to raise any concerns to a doctor not involved in the care of the deceased improve the quality of death certification improve the quality of mortality data
Medical examiners give an independent view on the causes of death and the care provided (except for deaths which must be investigated by a coroner). Medical examiners and their staff (usually called medical examiner officers) offer the families and carers of the person who died an opportunity to ask questions or raise concerns about the causes of death, or about the care the person received before their death. This will usually be through a telephone call, or sometimes a meeting. They can explain what medical language means and make it easier to understand what happened. Medical examiners also look at relevant medical records and discuss the causes of death with the doctor who is completing the official form (known as the ‘Medical Certificate of Cause of Death’). You can be confident medical examiners and medical examiner officers will provide an independent view.
Post Falls Care
A clinical audit was completed to review the incidence of falls in our Frailty Virtual Ward, and this enabled us to identify improvements to how the service assesses people who have fallen. This includes a checklist for falls safety and use of the Raizer chair used to assist people up from the floor. This has improved the way comprehensive assessments are completed when a service user has fallen.
Improving Medication Safety Following Hospital Discharge
The Frailty Virtual Ward supports people following hospital discharge for a period of time while they recover from an episode of illness. Most transfers of care from the acute hospital to the Frailty Virtual Ward are effectively managed with the hospital providing clear information on what the care requirements are and the medication regime the service user has been placed on when discharged home. However, there are some occasions where the medications information provided needs to be checked and verified to ensure accuracy or a supply of medication needs to be sourced. To ensure this is done consistently and effectively, a dedicated pharmacist has joined the team. This has enabled medicines to be checked and reconciled on admission and prescribing and supply issues to be resolved quickly. As a result, we have seen a reduction in the number of medication incidents associated with transfers of care being reported.
Co-Production in our Long COVID Service
Customer engagement is at the heart of all our services and our Long COVID Service really embraced this by setting up a Long COVID co-production group. The group was set up and led by an experienced clinician with a passion for engaging with service users to gain insight into their lived experiences and to use these insights and work with the service users to co-design the service. The co-production group worked really well together and identified three key priorities for improvement:
1 Communication – interactions with people using the service needed to be improved, starting from day one, with the initial contact text and leaflet sent to patients.
2 Information – people reported they were being given too much information at once and didn’t know where to look for good information.
3 Basic symptom management tools – people using the service wanted these tools right at the beginning of their Long COVID journey, ideally within two weeks of initial assessment
The Co-production Group have gone on to re-design the information leaflet for newly referred patients to make it shorter, more positive and to contain first steps information only. They have also applied their lived experience to inform changes to discharge letters, educational presentations and newsletters. In addition, the Group have co-designed a Microsoft Forms feedback form, which has increased the feedback received from patients six-fold. Patients are also now able to report on how their condition affects them as well as on outcomes and personal goals.
The clinicians involved in the co-production group have supported the redesign of the symptom management tools. As a result of all their hard work in 12 months, 31 sessions were run, with a total of 356 patients receiving much earlier access to symptom management tools such as breathing control and pacing techniques.
In March 2024, the Mid and South Essex Long COVID Service’s entry ‘Service Redesign and Innovation through Co-production’ won an award at the Medipex NHS Innovation Awards event in the ‘Improved Treatments, Therapies and Rehabilitation’ category. The award is an acknowledgement that co-production is now at the heart of everything the service does and that it works. The Coproduction Group is an invaluable part of the service and future patients will continue to benefit from the changes that have been suggested by them.
Learning Disability Champions
Within Provide Community we have developed a Learning Disability Champions Group. The group is made up of colleagues with a passion for improving the care we provide to people with a Learning Disability and the Champions are by led by our Safeguarding Team. The group have set in place a strategy that sets out a clear vision that people with a learning disability and/or autism have the same opportunities as everyone else to live safe and healthy lives and to be treated with dignity and respect. The focus of their work has been:
Developing ways in which we can work differently and more effectively, as an organisation, to improve the lives of individuals who have a learning disability and/or autism, who are part of our community and come into contact with our services
Helping our colleagues across the organisation to feel confident in understanding and putting in place reasonable adjustments in our practice and working life
Reviewing training opportunities and promoting mandatory training to increase knowledge and awareness
Keeping our teams and the wider organisation up to date with the latest information
Holding quarterly meetings where we exchange ideas, share our experiences and review progress
Patient Held Record Sexual Health Service
We have introduced a Patient Held Record (PHR) in our Sexual Health Services. The PHR allows patients to book new appointments or amend existing ones; receive their test results online; order STI testing kits and condoms by post or for collection; and complete triage interactions to be directed to the most appropriate level of care. The PHR allows easier access to the service and more choice.
Using the PHR people can book and amend appointments, request self-testing kits and view results online and get access to free condoms and contraceptive advice. Since its introduction we have seen a rise in the number of people accessing the service particularly from our rural communities and people are getting the care they need when they need it.
Looking Forward: Our Priorities for 2024-2025
Our priorities for the year ahead are designed to ensure continued delivery of high-quality care across the Provide Community Group and to contribute to improvement of health and social care services within the health and care systems where we work.
Our priorities focus on maintaining and improving:
Patient safety
Patient experience and customer engagement
Clinical effectiveness
OUR PRIORITIES FOR 2024-2025:
1 We will continue to develop our customer feedback processes to enable more people to give us feedback about their experiences and continue to ensure lived experience and co-production inform how we deliver our services.
2 We will review our incident reporting and management processes to streamline reporting, handling of incidents and how we monitor themes and trends in line with our Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) .
3 We will work with the Integrated Care System to implement PURPOSE-T (Pressure Ulcer Risk Primary or Secondary Evaluation Tool) - to standardise how we assess pressure ulcer risk in line with the new national pressure ulcer guidelines.
4 We will work with the local medical examiner to embed the new process in the community and work with system colleagues to improve quality and safety when learning from deaths.
5 We will continue to build on our safety culture in our community hospital wards by developing ways we engage with patients and the people they want to be involved to be involved in their care.
review qualityof performance
This section provides a review of our quality performance in 2023-2024 set against the quality standards of being safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. The information included demonstrates some of the ways we measure how well we are doing and enables us to explain, where relevant, the action we are taking to improve our performance.
Statement from our Chief Executive Officer Provide Health and Group Chief Nurse
At Provide Community we take pride in the quality of our services and always strive to deliver the best experience and outcomes for the people we care for.
This Quality Account summarises how we have improved quality and safety across our health services during 2023-2024 and reports on some of the measures we use to monitor quality and safety. This account clearly demonstrates that it has been a very busy year for our teams, but we have still been able to deliver high quality and safe services.
Throughout 2023-2024 we have seen the challenges currently being faced nationally by the NHS with demand for services rising along with waiting times for treatment. Provide Community is no exception and we too have seen a rising demand for our services and some people are waiting much longer to be seen than we would like. We are mindful of the impact long waiting times can have on people, so our teams continue to focus on this as a priority and have been working tirelessly to reduce waiting times across our services. We have also been forging ever stronger relationships with health and social care colleagues across Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System to collaborate on how we deliver services more effectively to support emergency care and reduce waiting times in services across the system. While we have made some progress in this area it remains a top priority for 2024-2025.
Despite the challenges we have faced, we have also worked hard to deliver the priorities we set for 2023-2024 and this report shows how much has been achieved with some of the highlights being the completion of our wound
care improvement journey and implementation of Professional Nurse Advocates and Schwartz Rounds to enable colleagues to reflect on the emotional aspects of their work, to support their wellbeing and build their resilience and effectiveness. The health of our workforce is really important to us, and we know that the work our colleagues do can be incredibly complex and stressful at times. That is why it is so important to provide them with a wide range of health and wellbeing support and initiatives which we report on in this Quality Account.
Another highlight of 2023-2024 was the implementation of the new NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) which replaces the NHS Serious Incident Framework. We implemented this in October 2023 and supported the rollout with Patient Safety Training which has been delivered to all our health colleagues. The focus of PSIRF is to ensure that there is compassionate engagement and involvement of those affected by patient safety incidents. This aligns with our own vison and values and have now set the new Framework in place as a key foundation block in our safety improvement system.
Everyone that works at Provide Community contributes to the culture of safety that we nurture and promote, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank our colleagues for their continued dedication and commitment and look forward to working together in 2024-2025.
Lucy Wightman Chief Executive Officer
Provide Health and Group Chief Nurse
safe
Safe
Are services safe?
Safe services ensure you are protected from abuse and avoidable harm.
Incident reporting
We have an open and transparent reporting culture which encourages colleagues to identify and report incidents or near misses. All reported incidents or near misses are investigated and action is taken where needed to improve safety. During 2023-2024 our colleagues continued to demonstrate a good reporting culture with the level of incidents reported increasing as Provide Community has grown. The organisation has expanded the range of services we offer including providing more community hospital ward beds and developing virtual wards in the community. We have also encouraged reporting by providing Patient Safety and ‘Freedom to Speak Up’ (Whistleblowing) training to all colleagues. We promote a no blame, just culture to ensure colleagues are not afraid to report incidents and near misses.
All Incidents Reported: Health Directorate
As a safety conscious organisation, if an incident occurs that involves care delivered by another organisation, we report it on our incident management system if it had the potential to impact on patient safety or did impact on patient safety. By doing this we can share the information with the other organisation to alert them to the incident and this enables them to take steps to review and improve their systems and processes. An example of the type of incident we would report would be a medication incident that occurs when someone is discharged home from hospital without the information needed to enable us to administer the medication safely. By working together with our hospital colleagues and other organisations we can collectively improve safety across the health and social care system. Our ‘all incidents’ data combines the number of incidents reported as Provide Community incidents as well as those reported as other organisations.
Of all the incidents reported, the majority resulted in no harm or minor harm During 2023-2024 we reported two severe harm incidents which were category 4 pressure ulcers. We also reported four deaths. None of the deaths resulted from issues with care safety.
Provide Community Source Incidents by Level of Harm: Health Directorate
In October 2023, we transitioned from the NHS England National Serious Incident Framework to the new Patient Safety Incident Reporting Framework (PSIRF.)
The PSIRF sets out the NHS’s approach to developing and maintaining effective systems and processes for responding to patient safety incidents for the purpose of learning and improving patient safety. The PSIRF supports the development and maintenance of an effective patient safety incident response system that integrates four key aims:
1 Compassionate engagement and involvement of those affected by patient safety incidents.
2 Application of a range of system-based approaches to learning from patient safety incidents.
3 Considered and proportionate responses to patient safety incidents.
4 Supportive oversight focused on strengthening response system functioning and improvement.
We have utilised the new PSIRF process since October 2023. To support this new process, we rolled out training to all our colleagues including the Board. We have set out our priorities in our PSIRF Plan. The PSIRF Plan sets out how Provide Community intends to respond to patient safety incidents over a period of 12 to 18 months (September 2023 – February 2025). The plan is not a permanent rule that cannot be changed. We will remain flexible and consider the specific circumstances in which patient safety issues and incidents occurred and the needs of those affected. If we see a rising trend in our incident reporting our Quality and Safety Committee may recommend a change to our plan if appropriate. Our current PSIRF priorities set out in our plan are:
Deteriorating patients – community inpatient and virtual frailty wards
Wound care - Category 3 and 4 pressure ulcers (inpatient and community)
Medication - Insulin Safety
Urethral Indwelling Catheters
Since introducing the new PSIRF process we have completed eight Patient Safety Incident Reviews and one Patient Safety Incident Investigation. Learning from these incidents includes:
Reviewing how we record test results in the electronic record. Reviewing the process for closing generic email inboxes that are no longer needed.
Reviewing how we support people who do not wish to be admitted to hospital against clinical advice.
Reviewing falls management in our community wards.
Reviewing pressure ulcer support and care provided to an individual.
Falls
In our community hospital inpatient wards and our virtual wards, where we support people to recover from illness in their own homes, we work to minimise the risk of falls by undertaking falls risk assessments and setting in-place care plans to help reduce the risk of falls. People who use our services can be frail and prone to falling. Most of the falls incidents reported resulted in no harm or low harm. Three falls resulted in moderate harm, and we followed our new PSIRF framework to identify learning from these events to improve safety.
‘This service has helped us to remain safely in our home, a strong wish of ours, and also helps us to not be a further burden on the NHS, re preventing falls’
(Community Therapy Service)
Pressure Ulcers
Of all the incidents we report every year, pressure ulcers are the most common incident we report as we mandate the reporting of pressure ulcers.
Many of the people we care for are frail with a higher potential risk of developing pressure ulcers. Pressure ulcers are injuries to the skin and underlying tissue, primarily caused by prolonged pressure on the skin. They usually affect people confined to bed or who sit in a chair for long periods of time. People who are frail, elderly or very ill are more prone to them. Where people are at risk of developing pressure ulcers, we put in place preventative measures to reduce the risk and to promote healing where they have developed. Most of the pressure ulcers we report result in no harm, low harm or moderate harm with the majority being low harm, 0.05% of pressure ulcer incidents resulted in severe harm. Where we identify a pressure ulcer has occurred, we review the care in place and consider if there are any additional measures we can take to prevent deterioration and promote healing.
Pressure ulcers are an important area for us to focus on as a health provider and we use our reporting to monitor themes and trends and consider where we can make changes to reduce the prevalence of pressure ulcers in the community. In 2024-2025 we will implement the new national pressure ulcer guidelines which will include additional training for colleagues and a change in how we risk assess and classify pressure ulcers. This renewed focus will support greater emphasis on prevention of pressure ulcers so that fewer people develop pressure ulcers. We will report on our progress in our Quality Account in 2024-2025.
97 % of eligible colleagues have completed Essentials of Pressure Ulcer Prevention Training
Provide Community Source Pressure Ulcer Incidents Reported by Overall Level of Harm
Medication Safety
We report and investigate all medication safety incidents. The incidents reported may be because of an issue with the supply, timing, administration, prescription, or storage of medicines. The number of incidents reported are low and the majority resulted in no harm or low harm only. We have had no incidents which resulted in severe harm or death. Our dedicated Medicines Management Team review all incidents related to medication and, where an incident has occurred, they review the incident and support the teams to learn from these to improve safety. They also work to prevent incidents by ensuring colleagues receive appropriate training, specialist advice and guidance to practice effectively.
During 2023-2024, the Medicines Management Team undertook an initiative to improve insulin safety. They set up an insulin task and finish group to identify themes and trends from incidents reported concerning insulin. The group reviewed current practices and identified and improved current processes, linking in with the Mid and South Essex ICB Insulin Safety Task and Finish Group. As a result, the following actions were taken to improve insulin safety:
Sharing of the data and outcomes of the review with the community nursing teams and supporting conversations and learning around classifying harm levels when recording incidents.
Reviewing the daily number of insulin administration visits per nurse to spread the visits equitably.
Confirmed Insulin safety training: “6 steps to safer insulin” to remain in place for all colleagues.
Development of a crib sheet for agency staff on escalating processes, who to contact and when to liaise with senior team if there are issues concerning the insulin administration process.
Individual/Group reflection on practice to be incorporated into team meetings to encourage thinking around safety.
Visit allocation lists to be checked prior to leaving bases. Any visits added to staff lists as extra are to be communicated directly to nurse allocated to the patient.
Some of our insulin incidents also occurred due to communication issues when people were transferred into our care from other care providers. To improve safety in this area, our teams have worked in collaboration with other providers in the integrated care system to promote the use of insulin passports to improve communication and clarity on insulin requirements and they also provide useful information to people with diabetes.
Provide Community Source Medication Incidents: Health Directorate
Wound Care
As reported in our 2022-2023 Quality Account our community nurses and Tissue Viability Team have been working in collaboration with NELFT and EPUT to implement the National Wound Care Strategy to improve wound care. This programme continued in 2023-2024 and has now ended.
Our achievements throughout this programme have been:
Enhanced and standardised education and training of our colleagues in wound care.
Standardised dressings and approaches to dressing choices supported by training and guidelines for effective wound care to optimise management and healing of wounds and management of infected wounds.
Set up and delivered ambulatory leg ulcer clinics for people who are not housebound.
Engaged with service users to co-produce how the service is delivered using their lived experience.
Engaged with service users to identify patient reported outcomes for wound care using a new App the team developed. Our Tissue Viability Nurse was recognised for her work in this area and was awarded the Edith Cavell Star by NHS England. Engaged with colleagues to support effective rollout of the new training and education package.
The NHS England National Wound Care Strategy Team reported that, by participating in the National Wound Care Strategy programme, we have supported their national work and informed the national strategies concerning leg ulcer care. Furthermore, they have also used the learning from this work to develop a Leg Ulcer Best Practice Bundle.
94 % of eligible colleagues have completed Wound Care Training
Infection Prevention and Control
The Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) Team provides specialist advice and support to the organisation and work closely with our Director for Infection Prevention and Control and our Consultant Microbiologist to ensure the right systems and processes are in place to prevent and control infections, in line with national standards, guidance and legislation.
IPC Link Practitioners
Our IPC Team develop policies and guidelines, deliver training and provide expert advice
They monitor compliance with standards and investigate incidents. They also lead the Infection Prevention Link Practitioner Forum. Link practitioners work in clinical services and have a particular interest in infection prevention and take a lead role in their service for improving infection prevention practice. Forum members meet regularly with the IPC Team to learn and keep updated with infection prevention initiatives and priorities. This year’s forum topics included updates for use of the digital audit programme, guest speakers, company representatives, PowerPoint presentations on specific organisms and national and wider collaborative workstreams such as hand hygiene and oral hygiene awareness. A new internal intranet page has been developed for access to supporting information and resources.
97 % of eligible colleagues have completed Infection Prevention Training Level 1
Infection Prevention Training
All colleagues are required to undertake Infection prevention training on induction when they join the organisation and then to complete refresher training in line with our mandatory training programme.
96 % of eligible colleagues have completed Infection Prevention Training Level 2
Throughout 2023-2024, the IPC Team provided colleague training to support the safe use of personal protective equipment including fit testing for the use of respiratory face masks in line with HSE and UKHSA requirements with testing provided for all new starters as part of the organisation Induction Programme.
Infection Prevention Incidents
As part of the government’s national plan, ‘Living with COVID-19’, the IPC Team have continued to work to ensure all appropriate action has been taken for the investigating and reporting of COVID-19 related incidents. They also supported the NHS response to Monkey Pox infections, ensuring colleagues were aware of how to protect themselves and others while assessing and treating people with suspected Monkey Pox.
Throughout the year a key role of our IPC Team is to monitor for infections of concern. These are caused by organisms that are particularly harmful as there is high potential for them to cause serious illness or death. If an infection arising from an organism of concern is reported, the IPC Team undertake a review to identify if any improvements to practice are needed to prevent further cases and to learn from the event. During 2023-2024, there was one incident of Clostridium Difficile toxin reported for a patient that transferred from a community ward to an acute hospital. An infection review was held and the findings agreed with the Mid Essex Integrated Care Board was that no lapse in care attributed to the infection.
MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus)
Bacteraemia
MSSA Bacteraemia
Safeguarding
Provide Community fully encourages and endorses that safeguarding is ‘everybody’s business’. In line with our statutory duty to protect people from abuse, when we are concerned that someone in our care is being abused, we report this to the Local Authority who has the statutory obligation to investigate and take steps to protect people from abuse. In 2023-2024, we made 195 referrals to the Local Authority. The Local Authority also received nine referrals where individuals or other providers of care raised concerns about people in our care. We have investigated these nine incidents to review the care we provided and where we needed to learn and improve our services. Learning from these incidents include reviewing with individual colleagues s how they document and record pressure ulcers and escalate these to their team leads. The safeguarding team have supported this leaning by speaking about documentation in their training sessions and during supervision sessions. The Safeguarding Team also maintain oversight of all incidents reported to identify potential safeguarding issues and they actively investigate incidents where a safeguarding concern has been identified to ensure people are kept safe.
Effective
effective
Competent Colleagues
Fit to Practice
Are services effective?
Effective services ensure your care, treatment and support achieves good outcomes, helps you to maintain quality of life and is based on the best available evidence.
Competent colleagues are a core requirement for a safe and effective service. We therefore mandate a wide range of training appropriate to the roles people have in the organisation and we monitor colleague compliance with training and training updates. The information in this section covers all colleagues within Provide Community not just our health services.
MANDATORY TRAINING PROVIDED
Dementia Awareness
Oliver McGowen Training
Display Screen
Basic Life Support and Anaphylaxis
Wound Care
‘Freedom to Speak Up’ (Whistleblowing)
Health and Safety
Moving & Handling
94 % of eligible colleagues have completed the Oliver McGowen
Learning Disability and Autism Training
Conflict Resolution
Patient Safety
Safeguarding
Infection Prevention
Equality and Diversity
Wound Management
Information Governance
Fire Safety
In addition, we support colleagues to undertake wider training opportunities to help them develop more expertise in their roles and to support their personal development. We like to see our colleagues grow and thrive in their roles and we hope that many will go on to work in more senior positions in our organisation.
EXAMPLES OF TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT PROVIDED
Catheterisation
Lymphoedema
Pressure Ulcers
Values Based Recruitment
Palliative and End of Life Care
Managing Medicines
Leg Ulcer Management
Care Certificate
Syringe Pump
Safer Recruitment
Identification of End of Life
Professional Nurse Advocates
Clinical Audit
Nurse Verification of Death
Clinical Supervision
Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary
Resuscitation
Transcribing
Raizer Chair Training
Diabetes
Advanced Care Planning
First Aid at Work
Injectable Medicines
We have also supported more nurses to undertake Professional Nurse Advocate (PNA) training during 2023-2024. The PNA role aims to build on the personal and professional clinical leadership of nurses, enhance the quality of care for patients by enabling nurses to reflect on personal and professional practice in a safe, non-judgemental, confidential setting.
Professional Training and Apprenticeships
We love to support people to learn and to obtain formal qualifications. We provide clinical placements and mentoring for university students undertaking nursing, allied health professional or non-clinical training. We also support a wide range of apprenticeships.
During 2023-2024 Provide Community supported 59 colleagues to undertake an apprenticeship in a variety of clinical and non-clinical programmes. 11 have successfully completed their programme with the remainder continuing with their studies. Apprenticeship programmes range across 12, 18 and 24 months depending upon subject and level.
Those who have completed their apprenticeships are:
6 Registered Nurses
1 Assistant Practitioner Speech and Language Therapy
1 Assistant Practitioner Occupational Therapy
1 Leader in Adult Care
1 Coaching Professional
1 Advanced Clinical Practitioner
Continued Professional Development
Throughout the year bespoke training has been purchased to enable colleagues in the delivery of service. These include:
University modules – Clinical Assessment Skills, Non-Medical Prescribing
District Nurse Qualification
Advanced Clinical Practice MSc
Specialist Anticoagulation Workshops
Marketing and Digital Strategy Module
IT and Data Protection Specialist Course
Learning Environment
A total of 126 pre-registration students were placed in Provide Community from nursing, AHP and medical programmes. This totaled 823 weeks of supervised learning.
We have delivered two pre-registration nursing student inductions (one each for University of Essex and Anglia Ruskin University), and this will continue for every intake per university. These events are to welcome and introduce students to Provide Community, addressing any concerns, and to include input from relevant university colleagues. A student welcome handbook is also sent prior to induction. Over the last year, the Talent and Learning Team has liaised with a number of specialist and newly formed services to expand student capacity in the following areas:
Tissue Viability Service
Urgent Community Response Team
Respiratory Team
Frailty Virtual Ward
Quality and Safety Team
Clinical Audit
In 2023-2024 we limited the number of clinical audits undertaken to focus on bedding in our new incident reporting system and implementing the new Patient Safety Incident Framework. We completed the following audits:
Colleague Awareness of NICE Sepsis Guidance in Urgent Community Response Service
Falls Virtual Frailty Ward
Invasive Group A Streptococcal (iGAS) control measures
Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) in Muskuloskeletal Physiotherapy
PICC Line Medication Safety
National Early Warning Score (NEWS2)
Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) Prophylaxis
Insulin Incidents
Information Governance
Information Governance (IG) is how we ensure we look after the information people share with us about themselves. We want to maintain the trust people put in us to keep their information safe and we work to continually improve the security of information and records we keep.
As such a robust Information Governance Framework is in place with accountability provided by our Senior Information Risk Officer (SIRO), working closely with our Head of IG/DPO, Caldicott Guardian and Director of IT Services. We recognise the ever-changing threats to information and information systems, so we regularly carry out effective monitoring and reviews of our systems, policies and procedures, making any necessary changes and updates as required.
Data Security and Protection Toolkit
We undertake an annual self-assessment of our compliance against the Data Security and Protection Toolkit which assesses our performance against the National Data Guardians 10 data security standards. The last submission of the Information Governance Toolkit took place in June 2023, and we achieved a scoring of ‘Standards Exceeded’. We are on track to achieve the same standard in the June 2024 submission.
Information Governance Incidents
Any errors of incidents concerning the handling, use and storage of person identifiable information is recorded, and we take action to investigate these and learn from them. All incidents are risk assessed and where an incident involving personal data occurs and is likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals, this is reported to the Information Commissioners Office and investigated as a patient safety incident investigation. In 2023-2024, there were no reportable incidents involving personal data.
To ensure we minimise the risk of information governance incidents occurring our colleagues continue to take mandatory annual information governance refresher training, following the mandatory information governance training completed upon joining the organisation. A series of information governance best practice and awareness messages were communicated to all colleagues during 20232024 via various methods including our corporate colleague communication bulletins, Information Governance Champions Network, periodic information governance newsletters and computer lock screen displays. In 2023-2024, in partnership with NHS Digital, we carried out two simulated phishing exercises to test our colleagues’ abilities to identify and managed phishing messages. As a result, we identified that we need to continue to raise awareness and administer more sophisticated phishing simulations in order to keep up with the level of sophisticated phishing attacks being used by hackers.
Caring and Responsive
caring & responsive
Are services caring?
In caring services colleagues involve and treat you with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect.
Are services responsive?
Responsive services are organised so that they meet your needs.
Customer Engagement and Feedback
Our goal is to involve and treat people with compassion, kindness, dignity and respect. Putting our customers first is a top priority for Provide Community, so we empower our colleagues to make the changes they need to improve service delivery for the benefit of our customers. We do this by listening to our customers and being responsive to their feedback.
We are always pleased when people take the time to tell us about their experience of the care we provided. This can be in the form of a complaint, a compliment or a thank you. We use all feedback to help inform us about how well we are doing, in providing the level of care people expect, and we use this feedback to help improve the quality of our services. In this section of our Quality Account, you can see how people rate us using the Friends and Family Test survey and how we report on the number of complaints we receive.
Customer Feedback:
‘The nursing team today were amazing. Could not have asked for a better service for our son. Their calmness, positivity and clear explanations made it a very easy experience.’
(Children’s Community Nursing Service)
Customer Feedback:
‘Very friendly staff, made me feel at ease and answered all my questions, no judgement and very open - I was very nervous about the entire situation but I felt a lot better about everything and reassured with the quality of care I received.’
(Sexual Health Service)
Friends and Family Test
The Friends and Family Test (FFT) survey asks patients whether they would recommend the service they have received to friends and family who may need similar treatment or care. People also took time to feedback to us via letter, email and phone calls. It is good to hear all the positive feedback people have given us but also it is important for people to let us know when their experience is less positive so we can take action to improve our service for others.
The results of our FFT survey show 97% of people’s experience of our services is either good or very good. We also include two additional questions in our survey to ask people to report two outcome measures of quality. The first asks whether the service user feels they were treated with dignity and respect and the second asks if they and their family are involved in their care. In both cases the results show people feel they are treated with respect and are involved in their care.
Overall, people who use our services report they are treated with dignity and respect and, of those reporting their family were not involved in their care, they advised this was because it was not applicable to their circumstances. Where we receive negative responses to our services, we review the individual feedback to identify ways we can improve our services.
Customer Feedback:
‘To all the wonderful team at Halstead, you are amazing. We are all so grateful for everything you have done for our very special mum!! She means the world to us and you have treated her as one of the family. Thank you so much.’
(Halstead Inpatient Ward)
friendsfamily
friends & family
Complaints
In 2023-2024, our complaint numbers remained low, in line with previous years. We experienced a small rise in the number of complaints we received in 2023-2024 compared to 2022-2023, linked to waiting times for services. Nationally NHS waiting times have been rising and we have been working hard to reduce our waiting times.
Further information about our waiting times can be found in the ‘Responsive’ section of this report. Our complaint rate for the number of contacts we see is 0.03%.
We investigate all the complaints we receive with an attitude of openness and honesty, as we believe every complaint can help shine a light on our services and enable us to evaluate what needs to change so we can find ways to do it. It also provides us with the opportunity to engage with our customers and to say sorry when we get it wrong.
In this way we continuously strive to improve the services we deliver. All complaints are reported to our Board and themes and trends are identified along with recommendations for learning and change.
Compliments
Below is a selection of compliments we have received about some of our services.
Long COVID
‘Everyone in the team that has been involved with me, has been professional, courteous, encouraging and most importantly understanding of my circumstances.’
Bayman Ward
‘I just wanted to pass on my thanks and praise for all the staff at Bayman Ward in Brentwood Community Hospital. I am humbled every day by the work they all do, I have not met anyone there who does not seem to genuinely care for the patients. My father has been a patient for the last three and a half weeks and I can honestly say from the moment we were welcomed through the doors on his transfer I have felt at ease about the care he is receiving whilst there. I would just like to have my thanks and appreciation passed on to all the team and to again congratulate the ward on its kind and caring attitude with patients’ needs and family questions always being considered.’
Children’s Continence and Enuresis Service
‘Throughout the years we tried several different ways to ensure my sons problem was sorted, they went above and beyond, and we have finally cracked it.’
Community Nursing Service
‘May I take this opportunity to thank all of the District Nurses involved in my recent care. To be honest, I would not have managed without them. My care for my nephrostomy was originally to be carried out after the first few weeks by my GP practice, however on my first visit, I was so incapacitated that the practice nurse arranged for the continuation of home treatment. This has been a lifesaver. Due to my vulnerability to infection the care and knowledge shown by the District Nurse team has been invaluable. They have kept a close eye on my condition, taking note of my increasing deterioration and had they not spotted and treated the infection at the wound site I may have been seriously ill. Hats off to the team, their diligence and expertise, and the wonderful care they have exhibited. I never feel rushed or that they haven’t time for me no matter how busy they are. You have my customer satisfaction gold seal of excellence.’
Community Nursing Service
‘I would just like to pass on a message of thanks for the care of a patient who died last week. His daughter is a friend of mine and she wanted to pass on how impressed she was with all the care he received at home. He had a peaceful, comfortable death with all his family around him. She especially complimented the nurses on always talking to her Dad even though he appeared asleep. She said she never had to wait very long for a nurse to come out if needed and every one that visited always reassured the family to call if needed.’
Essex Sexual Health Service
‘The service I have received has consistently been the best care I have received NHS wide. The staff are friendly, compassionate and understanding. They take their time to listen, work collaboratively with patients, explaining treatment options carefully and concisely. The care is truly person-centred. Yet they manage any risks effectively and efficiently.’
Frailty Virtual Ward
‘I just had to write to let you know what a wonderful service I received from all of the nurses who came to help and support me. Without exception they treated me with dignity and respect when I was at my most vulnerable. Everything was organised so quickly, with things put in place to help me. What a wonderful team - a great asset to you all.’
COPD Service
‘Wow, a massive thank you to you all, amazing staff and volunteers all involved in running the rehab course. I cannot tell you what a huge difference it has made to me in so many ways. I feel so much fitter, have so much more knowledge and if I need additional help, I know who to contact. Meeting and talking with other people with similar illnesses has been totally liberating.’
Access to Services
In relevant services we deliver assessment and treatment to our customers within the 18-week waiting time standard
As has been reported nationally in the NHS, people are experiencing longer waiting times for NHS services. In our health services we have been working hard to reduce waiting times where we can and have made some steady progress during 2023-2024. However, we have also seen a rising demand for services throughout 2023-2024 so it continues to be a challenge to manage waiting times, but we remain focused on this priority. Our children’s services have experienced particularly long waiting times as demand has increased year-on-year.
To address the long waiting times, we have reviewed how we deliver our services to ensure we are being efficient and maximising the amount of clinic appointments we can make available. Where we can we have employed locum consultants to provide additional appointments and we are working in collaboration with our commissioners and EPUT and NELFT to review service provision across the Mid and South Essex Integrated Care System.
Customer Feedback:
‘Visited at home to drop off bags and then remove catheter. All booked by phone. Nurses on time, efficient and gave details in case any ongoing issues.’
(Community Nursing Team)
Customer Feedback:
‘Quick in arriving, the nurse was highly skilled, took blood, updated us later with results and prescribed medication, a credit to the service and we felt went over and above especially to help us over the bank holiday’
(Urgent Care Response Team)
The service delivers a range of services to provide holistic support for residents, through lifestyle services and community support to help people make positive social connections. Some of our achievements are:
(Healthy Balance Service)
Well-Led
well-led
Well-led Services?
In well-led services the leadership, management and governance of the organisation make sure it’s providing high-quality care that’s based around your individual needs, that it encourages learning and innovation, and that it promotes an open and fair culture.
The Board sets in place the systems and structures needed to support and improve quality and safety across the organisation.
However, they recognise that working in health and social care, while rewarding, can also be stressful and tiring. The Board therefore makes provision every year to provide our colleagues with opportunities to take part in activities designed to promote their wellbeing. In 2023-2024 we supported the wellbeing of colleagues in the following ways:
Health
and Wellbeing Week
11 - 15 September 2023
12 13 14 15
Health and Wellbeing Week
This is a dedicated week of activities designed to promote colleague wellbeing covering a broad range of activities including:
Dealing with debt
Cooking on a budget
Mindful meditation
Managing stress
Mental health balance and working from home
How to relieve tension headaches
MIND session on mental health at work
Mental Health First Aiders
We are developing a network of individuals willing to be trained to become Mental Health First Aiders (MHFA) to support colleagues with their mental health. Mental Health First Aiders are not trained to be therapists or psychiatrists, but they can offer initial support through non-judgmental listening and guidance. Our Working Well and Essex Lifestyle Service are working in partnership to embed MHFA training within our organisation and encourage colleagues to talk more freely about mental health, reducing stigma and creating a more positive culture.
Workplace Health Champions
Our Workplace Health Champions are colleague volunteers who help develop a range of health and wellbeing programmes throughout the year that aim to make colleagues healthier. The activities they devise include healthy eating programmes, activity classes, inter-company tournaments and pamper sessions, as well as book clubs and fun craft activities where new skills can be learned or shared.
Colleague Engagement
Our Board engages regularly with colleagues in a variety of ways including walking round the organisation to speak to colleagues, sharing information through webinars, bulletins, and meetings with new starters at induction and within the first six months as well as at our colleague events. An annual colleague engagement survey also provides colleagues with the opportunity to give their feedback to the Board.
Our 2023-2024 annual colleague engagement survey demonstrated we have a culture of care and compassion in the organisation. It also highlighted that our colleagues are proud to work for Provide Community and are willing to go the extra mile. Our colleagues also would recommend our organisation as a place to work and as a place for their families to receive care if they need it and they recognise the importance of promoting a safety culture by being aware of the purpose of the ‘Freedom to Speak Up’ (Whistleblowing) Policy.
From our 2023 colleague engagement survey here is what our colleagues have this to say about our organisation::
‘I truly believe that Provide Community is an excellent place to work having worked in numerous health and nonhealth organisations previously. The culture of the organisation is strong, and I believe that the Board truly cares about its patients, service users and employees.’
‘I think Provide Community is a fantastic company to work for. I feel like I have a voice and my opinions matter and my voice is heard. My colleagues and I always feel supported by our line manager and we are valued.’
‘Since starting my new role within Provide Community, coming from a busy NHS trust, I feel supported, appreciated and able to really give time to all my patients.’
‘My line manager is one of the best I have ever had. I feel valued as an individual and I am given ultimate flexibility to manage my life outside of work. I feel measured on my outputs, not my inputs or the location I deliver them from. I am held to account in a constructive and positive way.’
‘My team and especially my manager are very supportive. My manager checks in regularly with me and enquires on every occasion about my wellbeing and if I need any further support.’
‘The Senior Leadership Team set a high standard in terms of leadership through a values led vision of Care, Compassion and Innovation, regular communications with staff and collaborative working. My experience is that these values are reflected in the people who choose to work for Provide Community, which in turn creates a positive work environment and one in which I feel able to achieve my potential.’
‘All senior staff appear visible and approachable.’
‘I find the monthly All Colleagues Webinar really good, as we get to see and hear from the Senior Leaders and Leadership Team. We can find out what is happening within the various services of the organisation, and this helps us feel more part of Provide Community.’
2023 COLLEAGUE ENGAGEMENT SURVEY QUESTIONS
I am proud to work for my organisation
In my job, I am willing to go the ‘extra mile’
I would recommend my organisation to friends and family if they personally needed treatment or care -
I understand the difference I can personally make to the experience of our patients / service users / customers
The organisation I work for puts patients / service users / customers at the heart of what it does
My Line Manager / Supervisor is visible
My Line Manager / Supervisor is approachable
At work my Line Manager / Supervisor is quick to respond if I show signs of being under too much pressure
My organisation really cares about my personal health and wellbeing.
In my team we challenge each other to think and do things differently to meet the needs of our patients / service users / customers - 93%
The organisation I work for puts patients / service users / customers at the heart of what it does
I have the right tools and technology to undertake my job
my job, I
the
me
I am aware of the ‘Freedom to Speak Up’ (Whistleblowing) Policy - 99%
I understand the purpose of the ‘Freedom to Speak Up’ (Whistleblowing) Policy
In my organisation, it is safe to speak up and challenge the way things are done
In my organisation colleagues would raise concerns about disrespectful, discriminatory, or abusive behaviours if they witnessed them - 94%
In my organisation colleagues from all backgrounds and identities are valued - 98%
Our Awards and Recognition
GEMS: Hidden in Plain Sight (75@75)
To mark the 75th Anniversary of the NHS 75 health and social care professionals from Black, Asian and other minoritised backgrounds who are making a difference in the sector but are often hidden in plain sight. Our Non–Executive Director Sultan Taylor was included in the 75 recognised people.
Sultan Taylor Non–Executive Director
Andrea McDonald from our Tissue Viability Service was awarded the Edith Cavell Star from NHS England.
Two more of our nurses have been awarded the honour of becoming Queen’s Nurses
Janice Slade won an award in the Community Cardiac Service
Long COVID Co-Production Award
In March 2024, the Mid and South Essex Long COVID Service’s entry ‘Service Redesign and Innovation through Co-production’ won an award at the Medipex NHS Innovation Awards event in the ‘Improved Treatments, Therapies and Rehabilitation’ category. The award is an acknowledgement that co-production is now at the heart of everything the service does and that it works. The Co-production Group is an invaluable part of the service and future patients will continue to benefit from the changes that have been suggested by them.
