Frequently asked questions

• Blackpool Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust: community services; general and specialist hospital services
• East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust: adult community services; general and specialist hospital services, children’s mental health services
• Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust: community health and wellbeing services; community mental health services, including services for children and young people and patients with learning disabilities
• Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust: major trauma centre for the region; general and specialist hospital services; a range of community services
• University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust: adult community services; general hospital services

Yes. The trusts will remain as statutory bodies, and each chair and chief executive will still be accountable for their own separate organisations.

The triple aim – which highlights better health, better care and financial sustainability – does not not explicitly recognise the critical role of the workforce in healthcare transformation. The quadruple aim adds an extra goal to acknowledge the importance of ensuring we have the right numbers of staff, with the right skills, in the right place.

The term ‘Provider Collaborative’ is consistent with national terminology outlined in NHS England’s guidance. At the moment the Provider Collaboration Board includes the five NHS trusts in Lancashire and South Cumbria, but our future ambition is to create a wider collaborative with other providers.

We use ‘collaborative’ to describe our collective approach to working together across the five trusts to achieve our aims. We use ‘network’ to describe the way a clinical service works in a joined-up way across multiple trusts. Often a clinical network will have one clinical lead who oversees the whole service.

We want to make sure services are as close to people’s homes as possible. However, to get the best outcomes, some specialised services may need to be delivered over a bigger geographical footprint, where it is clinically appropriate to do so. Pooling resources to better support fragile services, for example, means they will be more reliable and get consistently better outcomes for patients. (Fragile services are those at risk of being unsustainable because of lack of staff or other resources. People in L&SC should be able to access the same high-quality care no matter where they live.

There may be some aspects of corporate services we are able to deliver ‘once’ to reduce duplication. For example, by having the same HR policies and staff benefits across all trusts we will reduce duplication of effort and ensure our colleagues have the same high-quality employment experience.