The following article is taken from our August stakeholder newsletter. To receive our newsletter straight to your inbox, sign up as a member.

On Thursday 3 July, the NHS and Department of Health and Social Care published their 10 Year Plan for the NHS. We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who spoke to us and our partners to help develop this plan – our staff, volunteers, patients, carers and the public. Nationally, more than a quarter of a million people shared their feedback.

As expected, the plan is focused around three ‘big shifts’: from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention, and from analogue to digital. As well as setting out longer term ambitions, the plan also addresses what we need to focus on over the next three years to speed up our recovery and transformation across the NHS.

The 10 Year Plan will have big changes for how we work in future. We are reviewing it in more detail and what it means for how we deliver care at the Royal Devon. We will want to hear from our staff, patients, governors, members, and communities about how this might impact them and what they think we should be doing differently to meet the national ambitions for the NHS.

But for now, we know that we are already taking strong steps forward across the three ambitions of the plan.

Hospital to community:

• As well our skilled community teams providing more care to patients in their own homes, we are investing in our community sites to bring diagnostics and treatments closer to local communities. Whether that’s through our new Endoscopy Unit at Tiverton, our Eye Centres at South Molton and the Nightingale Hospital, or our Community Diagnostic Centres at the Nightingale and planned for Bideford, we are delivering more care away from the main hospital sites.
• Our virtual wards (Acute Hospital at Home) are also going from strength to strength, with great feedback from patients who are receiving hospital-level care, monitoring and treatment from the comfort of their own home.

Sickness to prevention: 

• We’re a specialist centre for research and host the Peninsula Clinical Genetics service, which diagnoses genetic conditions and helps people to lower their risks of developing diseases.
• We are also working with partners across Devon to deliver our Health Inequalities Strategy, and our teams support lots of prevention work, such as the recent lung cancer screening pilot in North Devon.

Analogue to digital:

• An area of strength for us, we are leading the way with the rollout of our electronic patient record Devon-wide. We are already seeing huge benefits for Royal Devon staff and patients, from more joined up working, to giving patients quicker access to test results.
• We are trialling the use of artificial intelligence (AI) across a number of specialties to support things like note taking during outpatient appointments, which can help our clinicians spend more time focusing on patients and less time on writing up notes.

The full 10 Year Plan can be found on the Government website here and a video is here.

We look forward to updating you soon about our plans and working with you to ensure we deliver the best care to our communities across Devon.

Sam Higginson, CEO

Dame Shan Morgan, Chair