Bridgewater Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust are joining forces and working as one to improve healthcare services for our communities. This is an exciting opportunity to really make things better for patients and staff, while also making services stronger and more resilient.
You can read more about how they are coming together through an integration programme on their website:
https://www.whh.nhs.uk/better-care-together/
Between them they provide services to people living in Halton, St Helens, Knowsley and Warrington, as well as Community Dental Services in Cheshire, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.
You will see more and more examples of how they are working together over the coming months as they work towards becoming one single organisation, subject to all necessary approvals.
They now want to start thinking about options for a partnership name to reflect their direction of travel. They would like to seek your views and make sure they get this right as they continue with their integration plans.
The chosen name will represent the approach to joint working, now and into the future. To be fully transparent, the name they choose now will likely influence the future name of their unified organisations.
It is important they start to think about this for several reasons:
- to signal that by coming together as one they are creating something new, taking the best of both organisations and being stronger for it as a result
- to help better serve communities and be more inclusive of all of their services (both community and hospital services, and those across broader areas)
- to communicate clearly and help provide continuity and consistency of information for staff, patients and communities throughout this period of change
- to be used in very practical circumstances where a single partnership name would be more appropriate (for example on joint systems that are to be used across both trusts and for joint governance and leadership meetings etc).
As with anything in the NHS, there are some rules needed to bear in mind with this – the name needs to include a geographic reference to the area served by the partnership (recognising that there may be a small number of services provided outside of this immediate area). It also needs to include a word such as ‘Partnership’, ‘Collaborative’ or ‘Alliance’, or other such word.
To help gather views, they have created a short survey. It includes some initial naming suggestions and space for you to share any additional comments and ideas you may have. All suggestions are welcome and valued.
The survey will close at midnight on Sunday 9 February.
Access the link below to have your say: