Our services receive regional and national awards year after year for the excellent and often innovative way care is delivered to our patients and service users. 

 

For the fourth consecutive year we have been named as one of the 40 best performing trusts in the country by CHKS, the UK’s leading independent provider of healthcare intelligence and quality improvement services. The 40 Top Hospitals award looks at clinical effectiveness, health outcomes, efficiency, patient experience and quality of care.

 

We were commended in the 2010 Health Service Journal awards in the acute healthcare organisation of the year category. This was for the improvements we made to patient safety, the quality of our services and the patient experience.

 

We know that cleanliness and a safe environment is very important to our patients and service users. All our hospitals have been given top marks for the second year running by the National Patient Safety Agency, a national body set up to improve patient care. All have been rated as ‘excellent’ for the standard of their environment, food and privacy and dignity - the highest rating possible.

 

Our hospitals have also been acknowledged as the safest place in the north east for maternity services, achieving the highest possible safety rating by the NHS Litigation Authority.

 

In addition Northumberland has been rated as one of the four most baby friendly counties in England under a UNICEF scheme accrediting health visiting and breastfeeding services.

 

The community health services for Northumberland and North Tyneside, and the adult social care services for Northumberland, which transferred to the Trust in April 2011, have further strengthened the Trust's range of award-winning and highly regarded services.

 

Recent awards won by our community health services include a national award for a campaign promoting the life changing benefits of speech therapy, a regional innovation award for a nurse-led contraceptive coil fitting team, and a 'bright ideas' award for a dedicated service to assess the bathing needs of people in the community. 

 

Social care services in Northumberland rank among the best in the North East for effective rehabilitation and "reablement" services which enable older people to maintain their independence, and also on the proportion of people with long-term support needs who have been offered a personal budget to enable them to take control over their own support.

 

In Northumberland a partnership including social care and hospital services has resulted in an initiative to improve hospital care for people with dementia being adopted by the Alzheimer’s Society across the country. ‘This is Me’ provides a snapshot of the person with dementia, to enable hospital staff without specialist training in dementia care to quickly understand individual patient needs. This work also resulted in a regional Health and Social Care Award. 

 

 Just as importantly the people who work for us rate our organisation highly. The majority of our staff would recommend the trust as a place to work or receive care, putting us among the top performing trusts in the country, according to the latest annual NHS Staff Survey. This is great news for our patients and service users, with 94 per cent of our staff feeling their work makes a real difference.