Your questions answered 1.0 We re pleased that you may be transferring to work with us in the near future and want to make this transition as smooth as possible for you. We will, therefore, updating the frequently asked questions and answers on this page. There will be further opportunities for staff to meet us, and to ask specific questions related to their personal circumstances closer to the date of transfer. Please keep checking the dedicated webpage for updates. 1. Is my job safe? We are proposing to increase the number of posts overall. We are currently expecting to welcome everyone who is eligible to transfer to join us in an equivalent role. When we have received and had an opportunity to review with current employers the final details of people eligible for transfer, then we will share further information. 2. Which services are affected? The CCG is re-commissioning 33 existing services (including eight included together as children s services), as well as commissioning two new ones (see below). Our partners already currently deliver nine of these services in Ealing (highlighted), we work alongside many of the others already. 1. Children s paediatric community health services a. Children s specialist community nursing b. Children s special school nursing c. Children s audiology d. Children s speech and language therapy e. Children s physiotherapy f. Children s occupational therapy g. Child development Team h. Looked after children health service
2. Community beds (admission avoidance) 3. Community beds (general and neurological rehabilitation) 4. Enhanced primary care in care homes 5. Ealing day treatment centre 6. Falls service 7. Community neurological and stroke rehabilitation 8. Intermediate care (rapid response and short term rehabilitation) 9. Adult community nursing 10. Tissue viability 11. Adult and children bladder and bowel and enuresis 12. Care coordination service 13. Community clinical psychology 14. Musculoskeletal services 15. Adults and children podiatry 16. Adults speech and language therapy 17. Nutrition and dietetics (adults and children) 18. Adult community diabetes 19. Pulmonary rehabilitation 20. Benefits and employment advice for mental health 21. Primary care mental health 22. Dementia link workers 23. Community learning disabilities (adult) 24. End of life night nursing service (adult) 25. End of life rapid response 26. Dementia support services 27. New single point of access 28. New chronic pain function within musculoskeletal services 3. When does the new contract start? The new contract is expected to run from May 2019 May 2029. 4. What happens between now and May 2019? West London NHS Trust (with partners) has been named as the preferred bidder by the CCG. This means that the CCG has assessed our bid for quality and affordability and judges ours to be the best placed to deliver the requirements set out in the prospectus. The next stage of the procurement requires the Trust and the commissioner to finalise the details within the contract. 2
Because of the size of the contract, the Trust and commissioner will also both work with regulators (eg NHS England and NHS Improvement) who will seek assurances that the services can be delivered safely and successfully and without undue financial risks. Alongside this, we will be beginning our plans to mobilise the new service, including working with the current providers about transfer of staff, patients, estates and equipment etc, and putting things into place so the services can continue to be delivered without disruption from May 2019. Once the contract is signed and further TUPE information received, we may also start to recruit to vacancies to our new service models ahead of the launch date. Meanwhile all of the existing clinical services will continue to work with patients as normal. No. 5. We have been told that it was not possible for the services to be delivered at high enough quality for the amount of money that is available. Is this true? We have worked closely over the past few months with staff from across the partnership and other stakeholders to design a proposal which we believe will deliver care which meets all the commissioners requirements, and which is safe, of good quality and can be delivered within the maximum price set by the commissioners. Although of course we expect the services to be delivered efficiently, as we all have a duty to ensure taxpayers money is well spent, we believe that the CCG s requirements are affordable. We are confident that we can reduce waste, improve integration between fragmented services, and improve the quality of the services, and deliver an improved patient experience, with the available budget because we are well established in the local area and can build upon our existing local infrastructure (e.g. Home ward and mental health teams, SPA, pharmacy, premises etc), whilst also bringing new ideas to service reorganisation. In many cases we ve proposed increasing the staffing sizes of teams, creating new clinical roles, and deploying new equipment and improved patient access. The commissioners have also allocated additional transformation funds to support further improvements of the services, and we have outlined the areas where we believe additional investment could be targeted over the first few years. 3
6. How are the services going to change? Initially we expect the services to remain very similar when they transfer, to minimise disruption for staff and patients. Over time, we expect to: - improve links between related services, in some cases with shared management or co-location, so that we can make care pathways work with fewer hand-offs for patients, referrers and staff - improve the services themselves by recruiting new staff, creating new roles, supporting staff to gain additional skills, providing new equipment and working together to develop the clinical pathways - improve links with other parts of the health and social care service, including all of the hospitals accessed by Ealing residents, primary care, social care and improved links for patients with mental health needs. Over the first few months, the commissioners expect us to prioritise: - redesign of referral and administrative pathways and to launch a new clinically led Single Point of Access for all of the services listed above - developing and improving the adult rapid response and twilight nursing services so that patients can receive a crisis response if they need it 24 hours per day - re-configuring the clinical psychology services into a new generic model supporting all patients across the community services, as well as launching a chronic pain service. 4
Our care model for adults and children seeks to link together the services along functional groups: 7. Which of the partners will I be working for? As the lead bidder, West London NHS Trust will be responsible for the management and governance of all of the services, and improving the integration of care. 5
Staff transferring will all be transferring to an NHS organisation, and can therefore be confident they will benefit from familiar NHS Terms & Conditions, pensions etc in the long term. Individual trust allocations will be confirmed during the consultation process to transfer your employment, closer to the transfer date. You will be given plenty of notice and have the opportunity to ask any questions ahead of the transfer. In general, West London NHS Trust will welcome: community hospital staff community nursing, bladder and bowel and tissue viability staff diabetes intermediate care staff care coordination staff clinical psychology staff dementia link workers community learning disabilities staff management staff administrative staff who may join the new SPA In general Central and North West London NHS Trust will welcome: children s services staff community rehabilitation services and MSK staff staff working in specialist services including speech and language therapy, podiatry and dietetics In general The Hillingdon Hospitals NHS FT will welcome: medical staff working within the older persons and diabetes teams. 8. How can this number of partners working together deliver care that is more joined up? Because we have been working together for many months to design our response to the contract we have developed a single vision, shared objectives, and a multidisciplinary one team approach to delivering integrated services. Patients, carers and referrers should see a single service, not the individual organisations, and information will be shared (with safeguards) so that people only need to tell their story once and care will be coordinated around the needs of the person and those who are important to them, not the separate organisations or teams providing care. 6
We have experience of working in this way in the other services we lead, such as Home ward Ealing (which includes three NHS trusts, the Council and a GP collaborative working together led by West London NHS Trust to deliver an integrated service) and the One You Ealing public health services (which includes the trust working with private companies and local charities working together). Our plan is to encompass a whole pathway of care including proactive care / planned care and reactive care / response at time of crisis and wherever possible this will be delivered at home or in the community with the aim of supporting people to be independent and healthy for as long as possible. We are also committed, together, to ensure patients, their carers and families are involved in decision making and helping to develop their own care plans. For the purposes of bidding for the contract, together we called ourselves Ealing Health and Care Partners, but we are keen to work with staff and local people to agree what we should be called long-term. Please let us know what you think. 9. I have been told I may have to TUPE transfer what is TUPE? The Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006 are known colloquially as TUPE and pronounced tu-pee. This is a part of United Kingdom law protecting employees changing employer as part of a business transfer. The principle of TUPE is to protect the employment terms and conditions of staff. This means that there will usually be no changes to individuals : Pension arrangements Pay rates / banding Increment dates Sick leave entitlements Maternity leave entitlements etc. Some other things may change, but a formal consultation will take place ahead of the TUPE transfer during which staff will receive information about any proposed measures (changes) and an opportunity to discuss these with the new employer. 7
10. Will the team structures change? We have designed a model based on the information we were given by the current providers about transferring staff, our knowledge of similar services (both those we deliver, and from national benchmarking), and taking into account the commissioners requirements (including predicted activity). There may be some reconfiguration of management structures as the services are transferred into a new organisation but more information about this will be shared when we receive further TUPE information from current employers. In our plans we expect to increase the size of the overall workforce, and across our partnership we employ over 10,000 people, therefore staff can be confident that jobs should not be at risk as a result of these changes. 11. Will the name of my service change? We are open to discussing changing the name or identity of some teams or wards, as well as preserving the unique identities of individual services. We look forward to discussing this with you when we meet and would welcome your ideas, and the ideas of our patients! 12. Will my service change location? We have been asked to expect to continue delivering services from their current locations initially. However, this will require negotiation with commissioners and the current provider / landlord over the coming months. We will share further information as soon as we can. We expect all services (including new ones, and central functions) will be based in Ealing, where West London NHS Trust has our headquarters. 13. Will we start seeing more patients with mental health problems if West London NHS Trust is the new lead provider? No. The patient groups should not change. However, know from our work in Home ward Ealing that over half of the patients who were referred to the service over the last three years were also known to other West London services (eg IAPT psychology, adult mental health services or dementia services). 8
We also strongly believe that patients care is better if their physical health, mental health and social needs are all addressed together, therefore we hope to bring additional expertise to support all the community services to meet patients emotional and psychological needs. 14. What will happen to my part time working / flexible working arrangements? We routinely employ staff who need part time / flexible working arrangements and will be happy to discuss your needs and confirming these with you in the coming months before transfer. 15. What will happen to my pension? If you are transferring from another NHS organisation, you will remain in the same scheme as you are presently in. If you TUPE from a non-nhs organisation, you will be given the choice to join the NHS Pension Scheme. 16. How will I access learning and continuing professional development in the new service? All of the partners are committed to ensuring that we provide development opportunities for our whole workforce and we have developed extensive internal and external training programmes to support staff to work at the top of their license and to progress in their career. We are also increasing the capacity of our Ealing Learning and Development Team as part of this transfer, to improve the range of in house courses we are able to offer. West London Postgraduate courses: https://view.pagetiger.com/postgraduateprospectus/22june2016 West London Leadership and management prospectus: https://view.pagetiger.com/leadership/2 West London Recruiting and Retaining Talent: Recruiting and Retaining Talent Sche 9
CNWL education, development and training: https://www.cnwl.nhs.uk/work-with-us/whycnwl/what-we-offer/education-development-training/ Please contact us if you have ideas or requests for additional opportunities you would like us to offer after you transfer. 17. What happens to my agreed funding for my university course? We are aware some staff may already be participating in courses that required funding from their employer. We will make arrangements to ensure that these courses can be continued without interruption and expect to honour any agreed study leave and changes to working patterns that are associated with these courses. We will continue to support applications for CPD that is agreed within individuals personal development plans / appraisals. Please let us know if this affects you during 1:1 meetings as part of the transfer consultation. 18. I am an agency, bank or locum worker in the services currently. Will I transfer? Please contact us (see below) and we would be happy to discuss opportunities for you to continue working in the service after May 2019. Our staff bank is always looking for individuals to join up offering a range of ad hoc, short and long term flexible opportunities for staff from all disciplines from Band 2 to Band 9. Ask to speak to our recruitment specialists or temporary staffing team: 020 8354 8885 19. How can I get in touch to ask further questions? You can contact us using the dedicated e-mail address below to ask any further questions which we will collate and reply in batches of FAQs unless the query pertains to personal information about you. ealingoutofhospital@westlondon.nhs.uk We will also be arranging a series of informal group meetings and drop-ins for staff over the next few months and we look forward to meeting you! 10