Read Jack Serle's latest HSJi Review, which discusses people moving across multiple trusts, highlighting safety, workforce, and infrastructure challenges.

The restructure of integrated care boards has hit choppy waters. Read the full article here.

Latest investigations

Oxford Health Foundation Trust

The trust is having to pay for hundreds of OAPs, has extended a contract with a private provider, introduced tighter controls on OAP approvals, is planning to expand inpatient capacity, is using the Better Care Fund to develop community services, investing in new technology to close the capacity gap, linking a single point of access service with an ambulance trust, facing significant staffing gaps driving high agency use, reconfiguring services to reduce duplication, relying on increased commissioner funding to deliver a planned surplus, aiming to reduce agency spend as a key part of savings plans, and has partnered with a workforce solutions provider to help cut costs.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital King's Lynn Foundation Trust

The trust is undergoing a managerial shake-up with a strategic focus on fragile services, while a group is coordinating the electronic patient record and new hospital delivery; despite poor diagnostics and emergency care performance and a long journey to resolve financial issues, the trust has been awarded teaching status, structural failsafe work is nearing completion, the new hospital is now delayed until 2032, and work on the outline business case is underway.

Liverpool Women's Foundation Trust and Liverpool University Hospitals Foundation Trust

Trusts are accelerating plans to form a city-wide hospital group, with a group board to run operations while trusts remain legally separate, group-level executives running transformation programmes, a deficit plan dependent on sharp cost reductions, job cuts in corporate services key to cost improvement plans, shared services being formed among specialist trusts, a clampdown on agency spend, a group procurement collaborative to launch, a new cancer centre set to open, a long-term ambition for a new health campus to regenerate the old hospital site, the trust working on a business case for a new electronic patient record, work underway to improve ambulance handover delays, expansions of SDEC services planned, discharge processes tightened, recruitment of staff for extra theatre lists to tackle long waits, mutual aid arrangements in place within the group, and a plan to expand PIFU pathways.

Datapoints:

The following data points were updated this week:

• E-COLI HOSPITAL-ONSET CASES (12-MONTH ENGLAND AVERAGE), E-COLI HOSPITAL-ONSET CASES (12-MONTH REGIONAL AVERAGE), E-COLI HOSPITAL-ONSET CASES (12-MONTH ROLLING COUNT), MRSA hospital-onset cases (12-month rolling count), C-Diff hospital-onset cases (12-month rolling count) for Acute in June
• CAMHS patients seen within 18 weeks, Psychological treatment within 18 weeks, Total staff, Medical & dental, Administrative, Allied health professionals, Healthcare science, Nursing and midwifery, Social care for Scotland in Q1 2025-26          
• Oversight level for Scotland in Q2 2025-26
• A&E waiting target, Beds occupied by delayed discharges, Length of delayed discharges for Scotland in July