Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) and North Cumbria University Hospitals NHS Trust (NCUH) hosted the first joint Annual Meeting earlier this week.

Attendees heard more about our achievements and challenges over the past year, and our future plans for health services in the county. There was also an opportunity to ask the board of director’s questions and hear about our new campaigns.

During the presentation, Michael Smillie, director of Finance, explained:

“I like to call the annual meeting an annual “check in”, it’s an opportunity to check in on how things are going, what we need to do both in the short term and long term and also celebrate our successes.

“We’ve achieved a lot in the past year in our journey to join up care in a seamless and integrated approach. We know there is still much work to do on this journey but now is a great time to achieve our goals by being at the forefront of change, being evidence driven whilst remembering to be open and honest.”

Chief Executive, Stephen Eames added:

“There has been lots of work going on throughout 2017/18 to make the health system better for those in Cumbria. We’ve started an integrated systems approach for health care by bringing services together and working on addressing the challenges we are faced with. We are challenged with an aging population, obesity levels, alcohol and smoking problems and we need to manage these challenges by being preventative and to help us we are working more closely with other partners and third sector providers.

“We are also working on exploring the benefits of joining both organisations together to support our future vision for proving more care in the community alongside our primary care colleagues. We have already joined up a number of services, including joining the Executive Team together.”

“We have just launched our new ‘No place like home’ campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of care in the community and why hospital is not always the best place. This is particularly important as it links with all the work we are doing within the system.”

Keith Amey, Governor at CPFT also spoke at the event about the new membership campaign aimed at attracting new members:

“We’ve refreshed our membership campaign with a new modern, fresh feel to try and encourage more people to become members. It is a really exciting time to become a member due to the vast opportunities you can get involved within to have your say and help shape the health services in Cumbria. Have a look on our new webpages for more details.”

For those who are unable to make the event we have produced a joint Annual Report summary document. Within this you can find out more about our work integrated health and care systems locally, what our teams have been getting up to, our performance and areas we need to focus on.

Read the full verison of the annual reports for CPFT and NCUH.