Excellent care together

Compassion, inclusion and respect: these are the values on which our culture is built. Co-produced with staff and patients, they reflect what matters to us most. However, internal reviews and the Big Conversation have shown that inconsistent behaviours and cultural challenges are holding us back. So over the next five years, we will make four commitments to embed our values into every aspect of our work – from recruitment and development to leadership and decision-making:

1. Celebrating and promoting our values

We will do this by making our values visible in every interaction; expecting them to be modelled at all levels and celebrating the people and teams who do so, using new ways of recognising colleagues for positive behaviours. We will also strengthen our staff networks to amplify the voices of specific and minoritised groups in shaping to our cultural growth. And the Board will lead a campaign to tackle discrimination and promote inclusion.

2. Setting fair expectations

We will do this by introducing a behavioural framework, aligned with our Trust values, to set clear expectations for how we work and support personal development. This framework will guide recruitment, development, appraisal and job planning, and make clear how we will address behaviours not in line with our Trust values. We will also expand 360-degree feedback to middle and senior leaders to foster a robust feedback culture and set clear expectations for appraisals and objective-setting. This will include consistent guidance for managers to support staff with additional needs.

3. Shaping our culture through leadership

We will do this by building a new leadership development programme and creating a ‘passport’ for managers that sets clear expectations of them. We will promote the visibility and accessibility of leaders by having them host conversations about this strategy within their teams. We will also launch an expanded leadership and management development programme to help people develop the skills needed to lead in complex environments, in line with our values.

4. Recruiting locally for values and attitude

We will strengthen recruitment processes to help us attract a diverse range of talent by embedding our values within it and adopting competency-based hiring across all roles. We will continue to value our international workforce while working to reduce our reliance on new overseas recruitment to less than 10% by 2035 as we strengthen our focus on local recruitment and community partnerships that will grow the skills we need within our local community.

Many of our services still operate differently on different sites, leading to variation in treatment, waiting times, and patient experience. The Big Conversation highlighted how confusing this inconsistency can be for patients and the frustration it causes for partners and staff.

To address this issue, our new strategy will make two important changes to how we work. These will align with wider system transformation taking place across Sussex and be co-designed with patients, colleagues and partners. To improve outcomes, reduce duplication and make our services easier to navigate, we will commit to:

1. Developing single treatment pathways and waiting lists

We will do this through a phased programme of review and redesign, starting with care for frail patients, and emergency and cancer care. All changes will be clinically-led, aligned with NICE guidelines and best practice, and developed in consultation with patients, GPs, and other partners.

2. Creating a new ‘front door’ for hospital services

We will do this by reviewing all our contact points with patients and healthcare professionals – whether online, in person, or by phone – to develop consistent and reliable two-way communication. This approach will align with the NHS app, which will be the digital front door for NHS services by 2027.

Being One UHSussex means being one team. That starts with a culture in which we all live our values, everyone feels they belong, understands their role, and works together towards shared goals.

However, the Big Conversation and our culture enquiry revealed that many colleagues feel disconnected – from each other, from leadership, and from decision-making. This strategy identifies four commitments through which we can build trust, bring clarity, and foster collaboration to become One UHSussex – one team united in delivering Excellent Care Everywhere:

1. Developing a new operating model and senior leadership structure

We will do this by removing duplication and clarifying leadership responsibilities; reviewing governance processes to improve oversight and accountability while reducing meeting numbers; and establishing a new Board-level committee to oversee and support the delivery of this strategy and its major projects.

2. Promoting a positive culture of One UHSussex

We will do this by embedding our values across all our people processes to ensure everyone understands our shared vision; ensuring every colleague has the opportunity to be part of a conversation with their leaders about what the strategy means for them; continuing to involve staff, patients and partners in change and improvement; and providing Board-level oversight of delivery of our culture improvement plans.

3. Providing equitable terms and conditions for all

We will do this by continuing to harmonise legacy terms and conditions and consulting with staff groups and unions on standardising contracts for new staff, with the aim of achieving full equity by 2028.

4. Ensuring our Board leads by example

We will do this by requiring our Board members to model the values and behaviours expected throughout the organisation; increasing their visibility across sites and services and bringing more staff stories to the Board; using a ‘problem-sensing’ approach to strengthen oversight of culture, safety and patient experience; and realigning our committee structures and strategic risks with effective decision-making and this strategy’s delivery.

Behind every great service is a strong infrastructure. At UHSussex, fragmented systems and inconsistent processes are holding us back – from booking appointments to managing data and making decisions. The Big Conversation revealed the frustration of patients and staff with disjointed IT systems, unclear governance, and slow administrative processes. Over the lifetime of this strategy, we will make five commitments to building a single, supportive digital, operational and governance infrastructure that will make it easier for all colleagues to get things done:

1. Simplifying and unifying our digital systems

We will do this by introducing single sign-on for all Trust IT systems to give staff secure access to unified patient data and support the implementation of the new Electronic Patient Record (EPR).

2. Combining operational data to help manage services

We will do this by introducing the NHS Federated Data Platform to provide frontline teams with the near real-time access to operational data that enables rapid data-driven decision-making.

3. Improving our corporate and business procedures

We will do this by simplifying corporate and business processes, including those in finance, HR, and digital, to remove duplication and unnecessary paperwork; using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate routine tasks; and ensuring the efficiency of HR and OD resources through benchmarking against comparable trusts.

4. Strengthening our compliance and assurance systems

We will do this by building on the work of our Single Improvement Plan; repurposing resources to support safety monitoring; improving our ability to identify and respond to risks; and maintaining regulatory standards across all our sites.

5. Following a clear delivery plan

We will do this by developing a five-year delivery plan aligned with our capital and financial recovery plans; supporting divisions in setting their own plans within the context of this strategy; and reviewing and restructuring our project, improvement and change-management capacity to best support strategy delivery.