Our Progress and Achievements

We have many ongoing exciting and innovative programmes and initiatives, helping us to deliver on our strategic aims and objectives to deliver ‘great care, close to home’ and the NHS People Promise.

Our people
  • The Board has continued to prioritise equality, diversity, and inclusion work with LCHS staff networks including participating in events such as LGBTQ+ History Month, Black History Month, International Women’s Day, and UK Disability History Month. Our executives also sponsor many of our Staff Networks.
  • We recognise the value of having apprentices in our workforce as a route to fresh new talent and developing our existing workforce. We not only employ apprentices at entry level, but we also offer ongoing apprenticeship training for staff at all levels. Around 10% of our workforce is on an apprenticeship and nearly 90% of staff have remained employed after completing an apprenticeship in the last seven years.
  • As one of only three Apprenticeship Centre in the East Midlands, we are proud that our Apprenticeship Centre is rated ‘Good’ by Ofsted main provider status by the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) enables LCHS to deliver apprenticeships to our own staff as well as any other employer.
  • In addition to this we have also reaccredited the Department of Education Matrix Standard. This further demonstrates our ambitions for working across our county as an Anchor Institute.
  • Our Volunteering Service is flourishing with 54 active volunteers. In 2023 our volunteers provided almost 2,500 hours of support to our services. Several volunteers have achieved the National Volunteering Certificate for completing over 100 hours of volunteering.
  • LCHS is piloting the NHS Volunteer to Career project, supporting people who are experiencing barriers to applying for roles through traditional routes.
  • LCHS is a People Promise Exemplar site which is working towards improving retention in Nursing and improving the working experience for our people by improving the conditions in which people work.
  • LCHS remains in the upper quartile for staff engagement score, posting 9th in the country for National Quarterly pulse survey in Q1 and 3rd across all community trusts.
  • We have a comprehensive range of health and well-being offers across mental health, physical, emotional and financial support. We have a dedicated team of trained Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) support and an excellent Employee Assistance Programme (EAP).
  • Staff turnover is well within the 15% target and the vacancy rate is comfortably within the 8% target.
Our services
  • LCHS has led the Care Closer to Home programme which enables those with complex care needs, or who have multiple medical conditions or are frail, to live healthy and independent lives at home or in a place they call home and out of the hospital wherever possible. LCHS has rapidly implemented several new nationally mandated services including:
    • Complex neurology, cardiology, respiratory and frailty virtual wards with a palliative and end-of-life virtual ward planned for implementation.
    • ‘Winter’ initiatives which helped to create additional bed capacity.
    • Discharge initiatives to support flow such as Discharge to Assess.
    • Urgent Community Response (UCR) which continues to deliver its 97% referral to treatment compliance against the 2-hour target.
  • LCHS has driven personalised care for Lincolnshire so that people have choice and control over the way their care is planned and delivered.
  • In April our Skegness and Mablethorpe Community Nursing Teams ensured LCHS became one of six test and evaluation sites in the Transforming Wound Care Programme in collaboration with the National Wound Care Strategy Programme and the East Midlands Academic Health Science Network (EMAHSN).
  • LCHS became the main provider of supporting and co-ordinating all pressure damage in Lincolnshire. Our proposal for new ways of working in pressure damage, co-created with partners, has been endorsed as the first Lincolnshire Quality Group system safety priority.
  • LCHS is the lead provider for the mass vaccination services across the country; Lincolnshire was ranked in the top three systems nationally for all pathways and programmes of vaccination.
  • In 2023 we started work on a new and improved environment for Scotter Ward in John Coupland Hospital in Gainsborough. The ward is receiving £3.5m upgrades to provide a modern and improved environment for patients and staff.
  • LCHS is driving digital innovation in the county to improve access to services including different ways of getting advice and treatment including such as telephone-based or virtual, matched to the patient’s individual needs.
Our partnerships
  • There is a long history of joint working in Lincolnshire between the NHS, primary care, local authority, social care, voluntary, community and social enterprise sector partnerships, housing, and children’s services, to address factors that determine health and to seek to reduce demand on healthcare services in a more preventative and proactive manner. We work closely with our partners as part of the ‘Better Lives Lincolnshire’ Integrated Care System (ICS).
  • Our Apprenticeship Centre delivers health and social care apprenticeships to Primary Care our partners including a new General Practice Assistant role to reduce the administration and basic clinical procedures that take up GP time in practice.
  • Delivery of the Integrated Care programme including Integrated Community Nursing. Three pilot sites in Boston, South Lincoln, and First Coastal Primary Care Network (PCN) are exploring new templates for working for improve joined up care in the community. The learning and evaluation of the pilot sites will be used to inform future models of working across the county.