Improvements made for patients, still more to do | Latest News

Chief Executive Mark Hackett said:

“We hope patients are starting to feel the impact of the many improvements we have made, particularly to reduce waiting times, and we would like to thank our staff for their hard work in making these changes. To give Plymouth the high quality hospital Trust that it needs and deserves, there is more to do to and we will be working on further improvements in what will be a tough year financially.

“In the last year we have made many improvements, including:

• We are in the best 25% of the country for most planned patient care, including outpatients
• We have gone from being one of the worst performing hospital Trusts in the country for 4 hour waits to being the most improved
• We are the 9th best hospital Trust in the country for theatre utilisation
• The average length of stay for patients who are admitted as emergencies has reduced from 8.4 to 7.1 days meaning patients go home sooner
• Between April 2024 and January 2025 we achieved 81% against the 28 day cancer standard - the highest performance in the peninsula and 4% above the national target.
• We are above our target of 87% of patients waiting <6 weeks for outpatient diagnostic tests
• We are leading in research in the south west. Our overall recruitment to NIHR clinical trials totals 33,374 patients. This currently ranks UHP in 1st place for our NIHR regional reporting metrics (SWP) and in 2nd place nationally. The only research organisation in England currently outperforming UHP is Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust at 38,674.
• We have opened new areas such as a Medical Receiving Unit, an Orthopaedic Suite, expanded Same Day Emergency Care, created new hot clinics, innovated in urology, cardiology, surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics and many other areas.

As we go into the next 12 months, we have many things to look forward to including

• opening a new Urgent Treatment Centre on our Derriford site
• opening our Community Diagnostic Centre in the heart of Plymouth
• implementing a new Electronic Patient Record and
• starting to build our £200million new Emergency Care Building at the front of Derriford Hospital

It will be a tough year financially as we look to get back into the black. Against the backdrop of global instability and very challenging public finances, the NHS is making some difficult spending decisions for this financial year. Despite NHS investment being protected by the government over and above other public services, local budgets are still stretched because of rising need for healthcare and increased costs.

 

What does this mean for us in Plymouth?

As well as continuing to improve our services for patients, this means that at UHP, we also have a challenge to save £67million per year which is equivalent to about 6% of our total £1 billion expenditure. We are working on a savings plan to achieve this.

To do this, we need to increase productivity (what we do) and reduce our pay bill. £67 million is, as it sounds, a significant amount and although we did deliver a large savings target last year (£56 million), we have never made a saving of this magnitude before on a recurrent (every year) basis. Much of our funding goes on pay for our 11,000 staff plus pay to bank and agency staff. Overall we will have to reduce our total spend on pay by about £34m per year from 1 April 2025. 

We will look, as far as possible, to make the pay savings through a combination of turnover and vacancies, reducing our discretionary pay spend which includes things like overtime and bank pay and better managing sickness absence. 

Our approach to living within the resources we have available is clear:

• We will prioritise our resources to direct patient care services and will reduce our running costs (non-patient facing services).
• We will always seek to act around the best interests of patient and staff true to our values, valuing everyone in our organisation for their contribution.
• We want to support local leaders to manage locally and make decisions as close to service delivery as possible.
• We know that by becoming more clinically efficient, for example, not admitting patients and using more hot clinics or alternative pathways where clinically appropriate, patients have a better experience and we reduce costs. There is more to go on our plans to improve urgent and emergency, cancer and elective care. We will be working closely with our service lines and partner providers on this, continuing the good work to date.
• We will be working with partners inside and outside the Trust, including our accredited Trade Union representatives.