| Welcome to the programme newsletter | Welcome to the latest edition of the Humber Acute Services programme stakeholder newsletter. In it you'll find the latest news and updates about the programme, alongside information about how you can get involved, share your ideas or ask questions.
This issue will focus on some of our plans around travel and transport. | |
| Focus on: travel and transport |
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What we've heard - travel and transport
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Each year across the Humber, more than 280,000 people arrive at our Emergency Departments, around 1.2 million outpatient appointments take place, there are also around 148,000 surgeries and inpatient stays in our hospitals and nearly 9000 babies are born at one of our maternity units. Around 14,500 members of staff work in our hospitals, typically coming into work between 3 and 6 days per week. When added together that is a lot of journeys (around 25,000 every day) as people travel across the region to access care and employment.
We understand many of our patients and their families find it difficult to get to hospital. Factors such as not having access to a vehicle, the cost of public transport and the cost of parking affect many people when attending appointments. We have also received feedback around the difficulty in finding the places people need to be at hospital; a lack of clear signage and inconsistent terminology can cause confusion for people when visiting hospital.
Our staff who travel regularly also sometimes experience difficulties with travel and transport for them and their patients. During the recent staff engagement drop-ins we held, members of staff told us about delays with patient transport services, affordability of transport, transport between sites for both staff and patients. We also received ideas around how we could think differently about transport for patients and potentially making changes to the shuttle transport that currently runs between Grimsby and Scunthorpe.
We want to hear your views and any feedback you may have around your experiences with travel and transport when travelling to one of our sites; we also want to hear any ideas you may have around improving or making travel easier when accessing one of our sites. Please click here to take part in our short survey.
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Transport action plan: What we've done so far and next steps
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Recognising how important travel and transport are within any change programme, we established a transport working group to bring together the key stakeholders who can help us to put in place the transport solutions we need. The group includes representation from a variety of stakeholders who each play a key role within travel and transport:
- Local Authority transport planners
- Public transport providers
- Community transport providers
- Patient transport providers
- Ambulance services
- Voluntary and community sector organisations
- Citizen representatives
- Healthwatch
A high-level plan was produced based on engagement with stakeholders and local authority plans. The transport action plan focuses around three key themes:
- Understanding holistic needs: this means improving the ways we consider a patient or service-user’s personal circumstances when planning their care (for example scheduling appointments during the school day for a parent with young children)
- Design out unnecessary travel: changing the way some services are offered can cut out travelling for unnecessary appointments – for example, consolidating appointments could mean patients only have to travel once instead of twice. This will help cut down the number of journeys being taken.
- Making transport easier: the transport systems currently offered can be difficult to understand and navigate. Some patients may not know how to access some transport options or may not know what is available. We will work with partners to improve the information and the transport options available to help people when making journeys to hospital.
We continue to work with partners to help make things easier for our patients and staff when travelling to hospital. We have established a number of task and finish groups that are working on one or more action under these key themes. We will continue working with our partners to develop our detailed Transport Action Plan and continue listening to what local people and staff need.
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Can you help?
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We have been listening to feedback and ideas from people across the Humber over the past 18 months and these have really helped to influence our emerging ideas.
As we develop these ideas for how services could look in the future, we will be continuing to reach out to particular groups within our community, to help us better understand how they may be impacted by any potential changes to acute hospital services. Throughout our work we are seeking to listen to all communities and individuals and reduce health inequalities in the Humber area.
The groups we would particularly like to engage with include:
- People living with serious and enduring mental illness
- People living with poor mental health, including parents and carers.
- Adults and children with learning disabilities or difficulties, including parents and carers.
- People from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds
- People who identify as LGBTQ+
- People affected by homelessness.
How can you help?
- Do you work with or support any of these groups, or know someone who does?
- Do you know of any pre-existing groups we could attend?
- Would you like to be involved and represent the voices of the people you work with?
If you answer 'yes' to any of the above, then please click here to register your interest in hosting or supporting a focus group or other engagement activity over the coming months.
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Ask A Question
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You can ask a question or provide feedback about any aspect of the programme at any time by using the online question portal.
Click here to submit your questions.
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We launched our revamped Humber Acute Services programme newsletter in July 2021. Each newsletter includes a range of information about the programme and you can access previous editions by clicking the links below:
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