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Hospital services

Our pledge: We will make sure that when people need hospital services, most are available from people’s nearest hospital; whilst providing centres of excellence for specialist care where that improves quality, safety and sustainability.


Providing quality healthcare as close to home as possible: We recognise the importance of providing quality healthcare as close to our communities as possible and will continue to plan our services in, to enable this to happen with our health and care partnerships.

Partners must join up health and care around individuals, so they can access high-quality services. Some hospital services will continue to move to community-based settings. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual wards (where patients are monitored at home) and consultations helped ease pressure on hospitals and enabled primary care and other parts of the system to provide essential services.


Continuing to develop centres of excellence for specialised services: There is compelling evidence that creating centres of clinical excellence improves the way patients are treated and gives them a better chance to live healthily.

Centres of excellence can attract and retain not only high-quality expert staff, but also have the right specialist resources located in one place. The number and variety of specific health conditions treated at these centres means that patients receive the highest standard of care for conditions like cancer, heart disease and childhood illnesses.

This in turns improves people’s lives and reduces the differences in health that exists between groups of people.


Improving flow through the system: Nationally, demand on our emergency departments is at an all-time high. In turn, this leads to full hospital wards, made worse by the challenges of discharging patients from an acute hospital setting.

Embedding new ways of providing services will allow us to not only reduce pressure on emergency departments, but also deliver more appropriate care faster and closer to the person’s home.

In peak times, we want to improve communication between our services throughout the system so they can escalate and de-escalate to support the wider system and take proactive decisions to balance demand.

We will continue to develop relationships with our partners and get better at using data and evidence to inform commissioning decisions.


By improving our commissioning relationships with providers of adult social care, including private sector and voluntary community and social enterprises (VCSE), we will ensure the resilience of the adult social care market and help discharge from the acute (main hospitals) settings.

Our ambition is that health and care services across Kent and Medway jointly plan, commission and deliver discharge services that keep the health and care system running smoothly and are affordable within existing budgets available to NHS commissioners and councils, pooling resources where appropriate and responding to seasonal pressures.


We asked people to share their views between February and August 2023. We have now closed our ideas boards. Thank you for your contributions!

Our pledge: We will make sure that when people need hospital services, most are available from people’s nearest hospital; whilst providing centres of excellence for specialist care where that improves quality, safety and sustainability.


Providing quality healthcare as close to home as possible: We recognise the importance of providing quality healthcare as close to our communities as possible and will continue to plan our services in, to enable this to happen with our health and care partnerships.

Partners must join up health and care around individuals, so they can access high-quality services. Some hospital services will continue to move to community-based settings. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, virtual wards (where patients are monitored at home) and consultations helped ease pressure on hospitals and enabled primary care and other parts of the system to provide essential services.


Continuing to develop centres of excellence for specialised services: There is compelling evidence that creating centres of clinical excellence improves the way patients are treated and gives them a better chance to live healthily.

Centres of excellence can attract and retain not only high-quality expert staff, but also have the right specialist resources located in one place. The number and variety of specific health conditions treated at these centres means that patients receive the highest standard of care for conditions like cancer, heart disease and childhood illnesses.

This in turns improves people’s lives and reduces the differences in health that exists between groups of people.


Improving flow through the system: Nationally, demand on our emergency departments is at an all-time high. In turn, this leads to full hospital wards, made worse by the challenges of discharging patients from an acute hospital setting.

Embedding new ways of providing services will allow us to not only reduce pressure on emergency departments, but also deliver more appropriate care faster and closer to the person’s home.

In peak times, we want to improve communication between our services throughout the system so they can escalate and de-escalate to support the wider system and take proactive decisions to balance demand.

We will continue to develop relationships with our partners and get better at using data and evidence to inform commissioning decisions.


By improving our commissioning relationships with providers of adult social care, including private sector and voluntary community and social enterprises (VCSE), we will ensure the resilience of the adult social care market and help discharge from the acute (main hospitals) settings.

Our ambition is that health and care services across Kent and Medway jointly plan, commission and deliver discharge services that keep the health and care system running smoothly and are affordable within existing budgets available to NHS commissioners and councils, pooling resources where appropriate and responding to seasonal pressures.


We asked people to share their views between February and August 2023. We have now closed our ideas boards. Thank you for your contributions!