Publish date: 9 September 2025
Earlier this year NHS England launched a new oversight framework. All trusts are assessed on a quarterly basis across six areas: access to services; effectiveness and experience of care; patient safety; people and workforce; finance and productivity; and improving health and reducing inequalities. Every trust has been placed in a segment that reflects performance across these areas.
Following publication of the framework, the quarter one data has placed PHU 104 in the league table and into segment 4.
On the trust overview page, there is also reference to the decision taken by all Hampshire and Isle of Wight organisations to voluntarily access the Recovery Support Programme two years ago. This action was taken to address the financial sustainability and service improvement opportunities across our wider system.
Over the two-year period of the Recovery Support Programme, we have already achieved some important milestones to improve the care we provide our communities, making our services more accessible and timely:
- Transformed our urgent and emergency care patient pathways across Portsmouth and South East Hampshire. Along with the opening of the brand new Emergency Department we are now one of the highest performing trusts in the country for ambulance handover times, saving nearly 5000 hours of ambulance time in the last 6 months alone.
- We have also improved the amount of time our patients wait in our ED with 75.5% of patients waiting less than 4 hours to be treated. This is a marked improvement from our performance of 65.2% in June 2023.
- Opened a brand new endoscopy unit providing a wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures to more than 15,000 patients a year.
- We have reduced our waiting times for elective care from 1263 people waiting over 65 weeks for care to just 16 people, and 4188 people waiting over 52 weeks for care to 2483.
We have also been working on some longer term projects to address the increasing health needs* of our community that were highlighted in our clinical strategy such as:
- launch of the Portsmouth Medical School in 2024 enabling us to ensure a supply of doctors to the hospital
- establishment of the MASST (Multi-Agency Safeguarding and Support Team), who support patients experiencing homelessness or rough sleeping through the Emergency Department at Queen Alexandra Hospital
- development of the My Renal Care app to enable shared decision making for kidney patients through tracking system and remote digital access to clinicians.
The oversight framework allows us to look further at areas for improvement and build on this progress. We need to further reduce the number of people waiting over 52 weeks for treatment and people waiting over 12 hours for care in ED. We also need to work with our staff to improve their experiences whilst at work and ensure they are confident to raise concerns and progress ideas for innovations.
We are confident that with the plans we have in place, we will be able to continue this progress and provide our communities with the best possible care and timely access to services.
* We recognise the unique challenges the demographics of our communities present. The number of elderly residents is rapidly increasing as people are living longer than before and many with complex and multiple health conditions. Portsmouth and South East Hampshire includes some of the deprived 20% of the population with almost a fifth of our admissions coming from these areas.