Our strategic priorities for 2022 to 2025
Our focus to 2025 is on four priorities:
- Deliver fair resolution. All of our services will focus on achieving fair and timely resolution, wherever possible keeping patients and healthcare staff out of formal processes to minimise distress and cost.
- Share data and insights as a catalyst for improvement. Ensuring that our unique datasets help derive usable insights that benefit patients and the healthcare and justice systems.
- Collaborate to improve maternity outcomes. We will build on our reputation as a trusted partner in the maternity healthcare system, bringing together key parties to determine what further improvements can be made within our areas of expertise to support the government’s maternity safety ambition to halve rates of stillbirth, neonatal and maternal death and brain injuries that occur during or shortly after birth by 2025.
- Invest in our people and systems to transform our business. The NHS is undergoing major restructuring while continuing to respond to and recover from the pandemic. We will develop our services to support this and have initiated two major change programmes to invest in our people, systems and services to continue delivering best value for public funds.
In developing this strategy we have paid close attention to our external environment and how it is likely to change over the next few years. We have chosen to pursue a three-year strategic period as we envisage our programmes will have an impact within this timeframe, and in recognition of the fast-changing environment we work in. We will continue to review the external environment and are confident that we will be able to respond to unexpected change given our organisational resilience, particularly through our wider supply chain partners.
Our strategy is presented on the assumption that we are able to deliver our priorities alongside meeting the ongoing challenges caused by the global pandemic.
What will the benefits be for the public, patients and NHS staff?
We want to improve the experience for everyone involved in the processes we manage so that patients and healthcare staff suffer less distress when a claim is brought or a performance concern is raised. Resolution does not have to involve formal processes or an adversarial approach. By working with others, our aim is to achieve resolution which delivers a fair result for all while sharing our insights to deliver improvement.
If we are successful in delivering against each of our strategic priorities, we will have contributed to the following outcomes:
- Ensuring indemnity arrangements are a driver for positive change across the healthcare system;
- A reduction in harm to patients;
- A reduction in distress caused to both patients and healthcare staff involved when a claim or concern arises; and
- A reduction in the cost required to deliver fair resolution, thereby releasing public funds for other priorities, including healthcare.
How will we know if we have succeeded?
We have set out the outcomes we are seeking to achieve through this strategy. However, demonstrating our impact will be challenging given that we often work in partnership with others and that certain outcomes will be time lagged (given the time from an incident to a claim) and influenced by drivers beyond our control (such as changes in the legal market). Despite this, we commit to:
- Using a range of methodologies and approaches to assess the impact of what we do – for example, commissioning independent evaluations, qualitative feedback and tracking indicators in the areas in which we want to deliver the change.
- Setting relevant key performance indicators through our annual business planning process which will be tracked in-year and formally reported through our annual reporting cycle and our accountability arrangements with DHSC.
- Ensuring that we use our new core systems and data analytics capabilities to further measure progress and impact over the course of the strategy and beyond.
How will we work?
At NHS Resolution we aim to create a culture where staff are valued and supported. We will continue to focus on staff well-being and development from 2022, using the Investors in People standards framework to measure our performance. The following commitments will underpin how we work:
Our Values and Behaviours Framework, which is agreed with our staff, will underpin our approach to delivering our strategy. Our values are:
- Professional: we are dedicated to providing a professional, high quality service
- Expert: we bring unique skills, knowledge and expertise to everything we do
- Ethical: we are committed to acting with honesty, integrity and fairness
- Respectful: we treat people with consideration and respect and encourage supportive, collaborative and inclusive team working.
We will continue to embed our Just and Learning Culture Charter and guidance, a tool to support healthcare providers to take a consistent approach towards staff in relation to incidents and errors.
Equality, diversity and inclusion will be integral to the delivery of our services, both in our work with and across the healthcare system and as an employer. Our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy will continue to guide our work in this area, and extend to the work we will do in the healthcare system. This includes contributing to data and insights on health-related inequalities. [CONFIRMING WITH HR/OD THAT OUR PLANS ALIGN WITH REQUIREMENTS IN FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT – https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/958031/DHSC-NHSR_Framework_Agreement-December_2020.pdf]
We will take a collaborative approach, sharing what we know and working with and through others. This will help to reduce duplication for those delivering healthcare and ensure we deliver value beyond our organisational reach.
We will build on our work to date to ensure that the patient perspective informs the delivery of our services in line with the principles of NHS England’s Framework for involving patients in patient safety. We will take learning from our Early Notification Maternity Voices Advisory Group and consider similar approaches in other areas.
We will continue to take the necessary steps to comply with the requirements of Managing Public Money and Government Functional Standards as part of the continuous improvement of our internal governance framework.
We support the wider DHSC strategy on data and will work with DHSC and others to ensure that we deliver our ambitions detailed in the Insights priority in line with the relevant legal framework(s).
We are committed to supporting the NHS ambition of achieving a Net Zero NHS by reviewing the emissions we have direct control over and those that we are able to influence. We will also support the local communities around both our London and Leeds offices, reflecting our corporate social responsibility to these areas.
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