A massive thank you...
... to all our teams for your compassion and hard work on behalf of the communities we serve!
- We are leading the country in research. UHP has achieved 1st place nationally for the number of patients recruited into NIHR clinical trials, making us the country's leading research-active trust.
- We are seeing urgent patients more quickly. The CQC found we had made ‘strong improvements' for patients needing urgent and emergency care and we are the most-improved hospital trust in the south west for 4-hour performance with the percentage of patients seen and treated in 4-hours rising from 65% to 68.5%. Average ambulance handover times reduced from 125 minutes to 44 minutes, which meant overall patients waited a total of 191 fewer days in ambulances in car parks this year compared to last!
- We are treating patients who need operations more quickly - in 2025/26 we achieved the target with 65.5% of patients being treated within 18 weeks.
- We are one of 27 Major Trauma Centres in the country and provide excellent specialist care which we are developing every year.
- We are working with community partners to provide more care closer to people’s homes through services such as our award-winning X-ray car and virtual wards. This year, our ‘Home First’ approach has seen 130% more patients discharged on the ‘Home First’ pathway from hospital, helping them maintain long term independence. We are focusing on preventative care such as lung cancer screening and investing in a new Community Diagnostic Centre at the heart of Plymouth City Centre.
- Our teams are leading in winning awards: We took around a third of all the South West NHS Excellent Awards. UHP won three categories regionally and our regional winners go forward as finalists for the national awards, held in June.
As we head into next year we have 4 priorities. Our number one patient safety priority for this year (2026/27) is to end corridor care. Our other priorities are to improve teams working together; faster access to first outpatient appointments; and operate within agreed budgets.
To clarify, in my regular email to all my colleagues today (Friday 15 May) I wrote about the 4th priority. I wrote about the savings we have to make. I did not write that we are cutting 250 nurses. Below is exactly what I wrote. It’s worth bearing in mind we employ 11,433 people.
"(We) need to make about £80m of savings (for context last year we saved about £68m). So this year will be marginally harder than last. Given the balance of what we spend our money on as described above, this will mean we will have to reduce the number of people working here by about 250. We can do this through several ways such as being more effective with our temporary staffing or thinking differently about where we have had vacancies we haven’t been able to fill for a long time. We are not running redundancy programmes like some of our neighbours at this stage, but that doesn’t mean to say there aren’t some difficult decisions coming down the road."
