Future Hospital Programme: Delivering the future hospital (Royal College of Physicians, September 2013)

Summary

Delivering the future hospital is an account of the successes, challenges and learning from the Future Hospital Programme.

The Future Hospital Programme (FHP) was established to implement the recommendations of the Future Hospital Commission. These recommendations were based on the very best of our hospital services, taking examples of existing innovative and patient-centred services to develop a comprehensive model of care.

The FHP worked with eight Future Hospital development sites, comprising multidisciplinary teams of physicians, nurses, managers, allied health professionals, social workers and patients on discrete projects aligned to the vision of the FHC.

Delivering the future hospital contains an overview of the improvement journey, outcomes and learning from each development site. In addition, to mark the end of their collaboration with the FHP, development site teams prepared a more detailed account of their experiences and learning. Both the summary and long-form reports are available from the link below.

Content

Key recommendations

The Delivering the future hospital report identifies six requirements that are key to improving patient care: 

1. Ensure patients and carers are at the centre of healthcare design and delivery.
2. Provide local support for teams to improve patient care in a financially constrained and politically exposed healthcare system.
3. Develop a collaborative learning structure to enable healthcare teams to successfully implement improvement projects.
4. Collect and analyse data to support ongoing improvements to patient care.
5. Develop future clinical leaders.
6. Partnership working between the RCP and local teams is an effective model for improving aspects of patient care.

The Future Hospital Programme has demonstrated that a patient-centred approach to improving services can help deliver better care for patients by more motivated, engaged staff.