Skip to content
left end
left end
right end

Delivering best care

Delivering best care

University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust (UHBW) was formed on 1 April 2020 following the merger of University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust and Weston Area Health NHS Trust.

The information on this page is historic. Visit the UHBW About us pages for the latest information. 

 

Delivering best care, ensuring that our patients receive excellent quality treatment at the appropriate time and setting, and are discharged from hospital at an appropriate time when they are well enough, is one of our key objectives.

We aim to deliver the best evidence-based care we can with care and compassion, benchmark our practice in order to learn, and listen to what our patents tell us, involving them in their care and how we develop services in the future.

We have a quality strategy that sets out our ambition for improving the quality of services we deliver over the next four years. Our strategy is structured around four key themes that are central to quality:

  • Ensuring timely access to services
  • Delivering safe and reliable care
  • Improving patient and staff experience
  • Improving outcomes and reducing mortality.

In addition we agree a set of annual quality objectives  each year and assess our progress against these, and the national standards, in our annual quality report.

As part of our ongoing work to ensure we deliver excellent care, we have signed up to the national campaign Sign up to Safety and continually work to introduce improved services for patients.

Recent examples include:

  • In September 2015 we launched a new transport service for critically ill children in the South West of England and South Wales. The new combined service called WATCh - Wales and West Acute Transport for Children - retrieves children who are critically ill or injured from district general hospitals without paediatric intensive care facilities. The service is run by Bristol Royal Hospital for Children (BRCH), and is a collaboration between the paediatric transport teams from BRCH and the Noah's Ark Children's Hospital for Wales (CHfW). The regional service concentrates expertise and serves as a single point of contact for immediate advice, information on an appropriate intensive care bed and access to a specialist clinical team.
  • UH Bristol successfully led a collaborative bid on behalf of 17 organisations to establish a genomics medicine centre in the west of England. NHS providers in Bristol, Bath, Cheltenham and Gloucester, the universities of Bristol and the West of England, the Academic Health Science Network, commissioners and patient organisations established the partnership to develop genomics medicine to help patients who have a rare disease or cancer. This is a new frontier in medical care, as genomics has the potential to develop a more tailored individualised approach to patient care and future patients in the West of England will benefit from these advancements.
  • We have been selected by NHS England to evaluate two innovative new treatments. The Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre (BHOC) is one of 17 centres nationwide to participate in NHS England's commissioning through evaluation of stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy (SABR). This is a modern, more precise delivery technique for radiotherapy, which delivers high doses of radiation while causing less damage to surrounding healthy tissue than conventional radiotherapy. Similarly the Bristol Heart Institute (BHI) was selected as an evaluation centre to offer an innovative new treatment for people with severe cardiac problems. The MitraClip procedure benefits patients who suffer from breathlessness and tiredness who have a leak in their mitral valve, which helps control blood flow through the heart. The procedure enables cardiologists and surgeons to repair the leak through keyhole surgery.