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Our partner NHS Trust
Reviewing our strategy, 2019-22
We share Imperial College Healthcare’s commitment to ‘better health, for life’ and strive to help our hospitals provide the best possible care by driving forward initiatives that improve the hospital experience for patients, enhance the wellbeing of NHS staff and enable innovation in healthcare.
To help us deliver these goals, we set out an ambitious three-year strategy in 2019 - a plan we completed at the end of the 2021/22 financial year.
During this period, we set an overarching goal to enhance the charity's role as a key enabler of improvement and transformation in health and care in London. We committed to achieving this vision by delivering three operational objectives:
• improve patient experience and help to deliver true patient-centred care
• develop the careers and enhance the wellbeing of NHS staff at the Trust
• enable innovation in health and care within the Trust and the wider health system.
We worked to deliver these objectives through our grants, arts, volunteering and fundraising programmes, and prioritised four key ‘enabler’ factors to ensure we set ourselves up for success:
• income generation through our fundraising activities and investments
• raising our profile within the hospitals and wider community
• evaluating and celebrating the impact of our work
• developing and supporting our internal staff team.
Through this strategy, we pledged to put people at the centre of everything we do. With patients at the forefront, we increased our efforts to improve the experience of care for everyone who visits our hospitals, which we believe leads to better outcomes for their health and wellbeing. We also continued to invest in clinical innovation, ground-breaking medical equipment and pioneering research to improve the care that patients receive, while focusing on how we champion our NHS staff through new professional development opportunities.
Lastly, we explored opportunities to work beyond our hospitals by supporting and collaborating with the Trust, with other NHS charities across the country, and with other public, private and voluntary sector partners to make a real difference to health and care on an even bigger scale.
The key elements of our 2019-22 strategy are outlined in the graphic on p11.
Evaluating performance and outcomes
Growth and development
The charity has undergone a sustained period of growth and development over the lifetime of this strategy. During the last three years we have expanded our activities in several areas to enhance our impact, and increased our staff team and operational facilities accordingly to ensure we are appropriately resourced to support our ambitions.
Impact and evaluation
Alongside the expansion of our grants, arts and volunteering programmes, a significant area of development has been our approach to impact measurement and evaluation. Having identified an area of need at the beginning of the strategy period, impact and evaluation has been established as a core function of our day-to-day operations and helped to embed a culture of learning and improvement across the organisation.
Fundraising
We significantly exceeded our three-year fundraised income target of £10.5m, raising a total of £14.7m over the strategy period. Our fundraising activities in 2020/21 and 2021/22 were impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic,
Objective 1
Objective 2
Objective 3
Enabler 1 Enabler 2 Enabler 3 Enabler 4
Manage our financial resources and income streams to fulfil our ambitions
Evaluate and celebrate the impact of our work
Develop our staff to succeed in and beyond their roles
ABOVE: Mealtime Volunteer Michael at Charing Cross Hospital. with an increased focus on philanthropy and corporate income during a period in which community and events fundraising was significantly limited. Additional efforts have been made to maximise our income from legacies as well as increasing grateful patient giving through a promotional campaign to improve the charity’s visibility and presence within the hospitals, and efforts to engage Trust consultants and clinicians.
Covid-19: response and resilience
Significant organisational resilience was demonstrated in our response to the Covid-19 pandemic – particularly between April and September 2020 – during which time we were able to adapt and remodel our operational activities to provide effective emergency support to the Trust as well as working with NHS colleagues to rapidly identify appropriate Covid response initiatives for charity funding.
Other highlights and achievements
Major achievements during the strategy period included: establishing a new intersectoral innovation funding programme supporting NHS teams to develop novel and forward-thinking approaches to healthcare challenges; delivering a series of successful artist-in-residence initiatives for the benefit of patients and NHS staff; securing Investing in Volunteers accreditation for our hospital volunteering programme; raising over £3m through our Covid-19 Relief Fund and rapidly committing these funds to support urgent response initiatives.
Learning and improvement
There were a number of specific areas of activity within the strategy where we did not deliver our plans as originally intended. These were mostly caused by unexpected circumstances or interventions – such as the impact of Covid-19 - and we have identified related learning points to provide insight for future planning and objective-setting.
Examples include:
• Developing our charity membership offer for NHS staff at the Trust
Limited progress was made towards our aim of expanding the Staff Arts Club to encompass a wider package of benefits and charity information to engage NHS staff. Although we’ve broadened the scope of regular communications to promote aspects of our other charitable activities, we’ve reflected on the way in which opportunities to develop new engagement activities were restricted after the onset of the pandemic and additional budget and staff resource was prioritised in other areas.
• Creating opportunities for NHS staff to volunteer with us
In developing the strategy we identified opportunities to raise the profile of volunteering within the Trust and engage NHS staff in the wider volunteering programme by creating patient-facing roles in which staff themselves could opt to volunteer. This was initially trialled at a departmental level in a small number of teams but the demands of responding to Covid-19 ultimately impacted the capacity for staff to volunteer outside their principal roles.
• Funding major transformation projects within and beyond the Trust's hospitals
During the strategy period we experienced challenges around ensuring alignment between funding requests and broader strategic priorities. Moving forward, we’ve identified the potential to create an informal committee of key Trust stakeholders to help us identify the most strategically relevant and impactful projects to support.
• Providing financial support for the
Trust's recognition scheme celebrating the achievements of NHS staff
In 2019 we committed to awarding an annual grant to the Trust’s People and Organisational Development division to support a range of initiatives linked to the wellbeing and professional development of NHS staff. However, the significant focus on staff wellbeing and facilities improvements within the Trust’s Covid-19 staff legacy programme – supported by our £1.7m grant – led us to re-evaluate how we can provide effective wellbeing support in future, with a focus on creating more agile and responsive funding mechanisms.
For information about our strategic plans for 2022-25, please turn to p40.
