Best Community Services Partnership with the NHS   

HSJ Partnership Awards 2024 - Best Community Services Partnership with the NHS 
Best Community Services Partnership with the NHS   
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How to apply

Entries are now closed

Shifting skills and capacity into the community, and providing both urgent and long-term care closer to home, forms a core part of the NHS’ ambition to join up service delivery and shift towards a more preventative and sustainable health system. However, a backdrop of financial pressures, a high number of staff vacancies, an aging population, and ever-increasing elective care waiting has provided a perfect storm for these organisations of increased demand and limited resource, which cannot be weathered without the support of the private sector.  

This award will recognise projects and partnerships leading the way in delivering continuous improvements in service access, clinical performance, staff retention and wellbeing, safety and many more, or developing innovative new ways of delivering out-of-hospital care.   

Judges will be particularly interested in those improvements and innovations that have been genuinely co-produced by the NHS and private sector. These will have involved close consultation with the communities they serve and achieved high levels of staff engagement.   

Eligibility

  • This award is open to any private sector organisation which works in partnership with an NHS organisation to enable or deliver care in the community  
  • These can be single partnerships or joint working projects, but must demonstrate evidence from the past two years up until the awards deadline date  

Ambition 

  • Describe the context of the partnership and the reason that innovation or improvements were required.  
  • Provide clear evidence that the co-developed solution served the patient or service user better than the NHS was able to deliver alone.  
  • Outline the targets set to measure the effectiveness of the improvement, innovation, or new way of working and the steps put in place to achieve them.  

Outcome 

  • Clearly demonstrate the benefits of the partnership on patient outcomes, which could include improved patient experience, waiting time reduction, capacity increase or optimised treatment pathways.  
  • Discuss how the NHS organisation has benefited from the partnership in terms of staffing, cost, reducing inefficiencies or ability to provide services.  
  • Describe any innovative practices generated by the partnership which have created beneficial outcomes. 

Spread 

  • Describe how the business has worked with the NHS to ensure best practice learning has been disseminated.  
  • Discuss to what extent the best practice elements or innovations generated by the partnership have been adopted by other NHS departments or organisations within the wider ICS.  

Involvement 

  • Describe how the different partners worked together to co-design improvements or innovations.  
  • Show how patients and staff contributed towards and added value to the goals and outcomes of the partnership.  
  • Evidence the consultative measures taken to inform, involve and enable participation in the design of any new innovation or adaptation to existing working practices.  

Value

  • What financial benefits have been realised by the partnership, or if partnering has cost the NHS more money than delivering the project alone, how have the non-monetary benefits outweighed the costs?  
  • How has the partnership led to material and measurable non-monetary improvements within the NHS organisation?  
  • Provide testimonial evidence of the effectiveness of the partnership from both NHS staff and patients.  

To find out more

For entry enquiries, contact James Elliot on james.elliott@wilmingtonplc.com