Vision and Staff
Our vision is that we become a High Quality Organisation.
Our Ten Year Vision
Our vision is that we become a High Quality Organisation.
That means:
- delivering the best outcomes for our population, preventing illness and maintaining wellbeing;
- being a centre of excellence for research and innovation and for teaching and training;
- being a great place to work where staff feel valued and work together towards a common goal.
To get there, we’ll need to change what we do and how we do it, building on the changes we’ve already made recently as part of ‘Changing for the Future’ – but also by accelerating the changes. Because we need to go further and faster. And that’s what you told us as part of ‘Our Big Conversation’.
The changes we need to make are captured by our new mantra – the ‘One Bay Way’.
And the ‘One Bay Way’ will become a rallying point for the strategies and plans we develop every year, each playing their part in the delivery of our ten year vision.
High Quality Organisation
We want to become a High Quality Organisation so that we can deliver the best possible integrated health and care system and outcomes for our population.
Central to this is adopting a Population Health approach across all of our activities, planning it in to what we do from the outset.
The successful delivery of our ten year vision will also result in a new deal for our patients and the wider population.
A more central role for healthcare in the community will result in the delivery of more services closer to where people live. Greater use of digital will allow for more remote monitoring of conditions and empower patients and their carers to self-manage their health, care and wellbeing.
And our focus on quality will result in better patient outcomes and greater efficiencies as we get things right first time, meaning that we don’t only treat conditions, but that we increasingly prevent illness.
We’ll do these things for our own population but we’ll also provide a range of complex and specialist services to a much wider population base, working with partner organisations, in particular Cardiff & Vale UHB, to ensure that our organisations’ tertiary offer is based on delivering the best possible patient experience rather than organisational considerations.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
Come for the opportunity, stay for the community.
I love meeting new people in new teams. I am often surprised by what is going on in other areas (of the health board).
I have always lived in or near Swansea, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else – we have it all, city with shops, coast, easy access to Cardiff.
Culture is key
The people aspect is key and central to the successful delivery of this vision. That’s why we are placing so much emphasis on our culture, much of which will be driven by our Values and Behaviours:
Caring for each other
We’re friendly, kind and recognise everybody as an individual.
Working together
We’re honest and open with one another, genuinely seeking and acting on feedback.
Always improving
We do what we say we’ll do and always search for better.
The Behaviours build on the Values and are tangible, helping guide the way we act as individuals and setting out clear expectations for how others should treat us. It is up to all of us to ‘live’ the Values and Behaviours and champion them and to call it out when they are not being followed.
Building on the Values and Behaviours is our People Promise – see Appendix One. It sets out what staff can expect from the Health Board and what the Health Board expects from its staff.
It represents a mature approach to work – one where staff are supported and empowered but where there is also an expectation of delivery and that staff are empowered to call out when individuals don’t conform to the expected standards of behaviour and collaborative working.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
The Behaviours build on the Values and are tangible, helping guide the way we act as individuals and setting out clear expectations for how others should our staff. It is up to all our staff to ‘live’ the Values and Behaviours and champion them and to call it out when they are not being followed.
Building on the Values and Behaviours is our People Promise. It sets out what staff can expect from the Health Board and what the Health Board expects from its staff.
It represents a mature approach to work – one where staff are supported and empowered but where there is also an expectation of delivery and that staff are empowered to call out when individuals don’t conform to the expected standards of behaviour and collaborative working.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
Organising ourselves around our patients
Rather than organising our patients around our structures and services, our new ten year vision flips that around. We will organise ourselves around our patients. That’s a philosophy rather than a plan because we want individuals and teams to own this and to work out how best they can make this happen.
But to get there, we will need to better understand our population and our patients. That’s why we will invest in gathering insights from both patients and staff. We won’t just engage with our patients when we want to make changes to services – we’ll engage with them every step of the way so that patients are active participants in the way we design our services.
Each Service Group will develop an annual plan that will outline how, over time, more and more services will be designed around the patients and where increasingly, as an integrated health system, we are able to consider the holistic needs of our patients wo have multiple conditions rather than dealing with them on a condition by condition basis.
That’s why we will break down silos. Our Service Groups will work together in the best interests of our patients.
We will review Patient Pathways from end to end, working across and beyond Service Group boundaries as we organise ourselves around the patients, breaking down the barriers between community and secondary care.
This shift change will be supported by effective digital solutions that enable more efficient ways of working, with access to the right information at the point of care regardless of where that care is provided.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
Clinically led
We firmly believe that high quality services result in better outcomes and greater efficiency. That’s why we are unambiguously focusing our decision-making on clinical considerations.
We want to get things right first time, prevent illnesses rather than treat them, treat the patient as an individual and focus on outcomes.
Our clinical leaders, our subject-matter experts, will advise on the nationally and internationally recognised markers of quality for any given condition, and will be supported to establish programmes of improvement aimed at matching or exceeding those standards in our Health Board.
Those markers of excellence will be shared within clinical teams so that everyone working in that service, no matter what their position, understands the role they play in influencing the quality of care for patients in their service.
And we want our strategies and plans to support this approach, rather than suffocate it.
Similarly, our governance arrangements, our systems and processes, our estate, our digital capabilities and our support services all need to get behind our clinically led approach.
That will see a rebalancing of resources, with more embedded within Service Groups, bolstering their capacity and capabilities, rather than sitting above them in corporate departments.
But with that bolstering will come added responsibility and a greater focus on performance and delivery.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
Empowerment
To become a High Quality Organisation, we need motivated and capable staff, not least because there’s a clear and well documented link between staff well-being and the quality of patient outcomes.
That’s why we are focusing on filling vacancies – tackling the root cause of staff stress – and ensuring that Service Groups have the tools they need to do their jobs.
And it’s why each Service Group will be required to include staff experience as part of their Annual Plan.
At the heart of our efforts to create a motivated and capable workforce will be our focus on empowerment.
The ‘One Bay Way’ is all about empowerment. It isn’t necessarily about doing things the same way across all parts of the Health Board, although there will be some instances where that’s the case.
The ‘One Bay Way’ is all about clinically led decisions made by empowered staff, leading to the delivery of high quality services that result in more efficient use of resources.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
A focus on performance
Much of what has been considered so far is about ethos and about creating the conditions for our long term success as a Health Board.
Since this is a ten year vision, it is important to understand where we are and where we’re headed in terms of performance.
So, a critical part of becoming a High Quality Organisation is how we adopt an unrelenting and laser like focus on performance, recognising that performance measures are all measures of quality and patient experience.
All of our plans – at a Health Board level as well as a Service Group level – will be clear on what we’re seeking to achieve and by when.
Our performance management systems will tie in with these plans so that we measure against what we are doing and what we are resourcing.
And we will report regularly so that our Service Groups are able to adapt their approach depending on how they are doing within their Service Group or the extent to which they need to support other Service Groups.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
We’re part of a system
While this Vision is predominantly focused on what we do as a Health Board and how we organise ourselves, it also represents how we work with our partner organisations.
We cannot deliver our ambitious vision for the future alone.
We need to work with our partners to ensure that we are aligned and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We need a genuinely integrated health and care system. That requires honesty and constructive challenge.
We’re up for that and we’re sure our partners are too.
We’ll break down silos internally and we’ll work with our partner organisations to break down any silos between us.
This is our ‘One Bay Way.’
Turning our vision into action
Our vision purposefully avoids being overly-prescriptive. That would cut across its focus on empowerment and we all know that dictating solutions to individuals rarely results in genuine buy-in and commitment and can often result in non-delivery.
Teams will be empowered to tackle the following building block objectives that will drive us towards becoming a High Quality Organisation:
- Objective 1 – Deliver the quality strategy principles.
- Objective 2 – Create an environment where staff can flourish through our people promise.
- Objective 3 – Build the business and get the guidance to build compliance and competency.
- Objective 4 – Provide the leadership, culture and attitudes for a high-quality resource organisation.
- Objective 5 – Focus on quality improvement, capacity and capability.
- Objective 6 – Create the right environment with patients for integrated care.
- Objective 7 – Centre our organisation on the patient or service users.
This is our ‘One Bay Way’.
And finally…
This ten year vision is hugely ambitious. It requires a fundamental change in approach and it will be difficult.
For some, our ‘One Bay Way’ mantra will feel uncomfortable because of the emphasis it will place on accountability. In other words, individuals and teams will be given the support they need and empowered to deliver but they will also be held to account over that delivery.
Changes such as this are often uncomfortable. If they weren’t uncomfortable we would have already made the changes. But it’s unquestionably the right thing to do.
Our people wanted to be empowered. Our people wanted to feel as if they could come up with solutions to the problems they face on a day to day basis. Our people wanted leaders to listen and focus on well-being. Our people wanted to provide a better service to our patients and to our population.
So this vision, ambitious as it is, delivers against what you told us. It delivers for our patients. It delivers for our population. And it delivers for our staff.
This vision is our ‘One Bay Way’.