Our ambition is to become an Outstanding provider of NHS care with hospitals that we can all feel rightly proud of because they are patient-focused and clinically-led.

When colleagues in every staff group have more autonomy to act, the quality and efficiency of health services improves. Outstanding hospitals throughout the NHS excel in widespread clinical engagement.

Some of the most significant improvements in patient experience at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust have been made by our clinical teams, simply on their own initiative. We want to build on these successes by becoming even more of a clinically-led organisation.

We have created a vision with our staff to make MTW a place that all of our colleagues feel part of and, have a genuine stake in. Our shared aims to achieve our vision and, make MTW a more clinically-led and patient-focused place, are:

• To create more inclusive clinical leadership and share good leadership behaviours.
• To empower and support all of our clinical and healthcare professionals to act.
• To champion excellent communication and staff engagement.
• To support colleagues to see and lead the whole of their services including quality, finance and workforce.
• To make our clinically-led services even more patient-centred and committed to excellence.
• To support our clinical teams to take ownership of challenges and importantly the solutions.
• To secure the time, capability, development and resources to help our clinical colleagues get the job done.
• To ensure our clinical leadership teams take a responsibility for the health of MTW as well as our patients.

We have developed a document that describes the work we are doing to make our hospitals more clinically-led (updated October 2022 to include the Trust’s current divisional management teams).

This explains the leadership behaviours we want to see prevail throughout MTW, describes our clinically-led and patient-focused Quality Strategy and, shows how we are supporting more of our colleagues to deliver outstanding care by improving the quality and efficiency of our services their way.

To assist this, we are investing in leadership development and talent management, and implementing a Quality, Service Improvement and Redesign (QSIR) faculty to support colleagues in making the changes they want to see.