04.12.17
Greater Manchester trusts come together to form £1.3bn healthcare organisation
Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust (PAT) and Salford Royal NHS FT have combined to form a new healthcare organisation responsible for serving over 1 million people.
The new Northern Care Alliance NHS Group will be made up of 17,000 staff, with a combined operating budget of £1.3bn.
Working across five hospitals with 2,000 beds, it will aim to improve care across services by standardising practices, establishing shared clinical support services, developing accountable care organisations (ACO), and building partnerships with other providers.
The alliance will be led by Sir David Dalton, who became chief executive of both trusts when he took charge of PAT in April last year.
Dalton said: “These new local arrangements for our care organisations for Oldham, Bury and Rochdale, Salford and North Manchester place the emphasis for operational management of health services where it matters - in each hospital and locality.
“They strengthen senior leadership support at hospital-level, enabling better engagement with staff and clinical teams.
“Compared with the previous, more remote trust HQ they are closer to the ‘shop floor’, understanding the challenges and issues staff are facing. These teams will build strong relationships with each of our local health and social care partners.”
Under the alliance, four care organisations for Oldham, Bury/Rochdale, North Manchester and Salford have become responsible for providing healthcare services to local communities.
Each care organisation and hospital site now has its own director leadership team led by a chief officer and consisting of a medical director, director of nursing, and finance director.
Jim Potter, chairman of the new alliance, said: “These are challenging but also exciting times for our patients and staff in our Northern Care Alliance with much work to do, but we have fantastic, skilled and dedicated staff to deliver the agenda.
“Our new group structure of our Alliance, with individual Care Organisations within it, will deliver a local flavour and feel to healthcare delivery across the north-east part of Greater Manchester.
“The benefits that will flow from the group to patients and staff should not be underestimated, not only for day to day service delivery, but also in areas such as staff recruitment and retention, research and development, and the application of IT digital systems and processes into the NHS.”
Bosses feel the new group is ideally placed to deal with the creation of integrated care organisations (ICOs) and each new care organisation is expected to work closely with local councils to develop an ICO to join together health and care services and shift more care into the community.
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