Clinical  Strategy

North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust – 2025 to 2030

On this page:

Welcome

Our purpose is to deliver ‘safe, high quality care, every time’ aiming to be a ‘nationally recognised centre for excellence for integrated rural and coastal medicine and care’;
our Clinical Strategy will enable us to deliver this.

I would like to thank all those involved in developing this including our patients, our communities and our people who have provided a wealth of information which has been key to informing our strategy.

We are an integrated Trust working within a system and recognise the need to collaborate with our partners including within the Great North Healthcare Alliance to ensure care is available for our patients in the right place and at the right time.

It is an exciting time in Cumbria as we work with University of Cumbria and Imperial College, London to open the first medical school located in Carlisle. Pears Cumbria School of Medicine opens in September 2025 and provides an opportunity to locally train and retain doctors within Cumbria.  

In addition to opportunities for education we want to increase our focus on research and learning; we want all our people to work with us and be involved in continuous innovation so we can improve pathways of care for patients within Cumbria.

Other enabling strategies will be developed alongside this; including the Cancer Strategy and the Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Strategy as directed by the Trust’s Corporate Strategy.

We look forward to working on this together.

Dr Adrian Clements
Executive Medical Director

Introduction

Our Purpose: "Safe, high, quality care for our patients every time"

Our values:

Kindness - Kindness and compassion cost nothing, yet accomplish a great deal
Respect - We are respectful to everyone and are open, honest and fair - respect behaviours
Ambition - We set goals to achieve the best for our patients, teams, organisation and our partners
Collaboration - We are stronger and better working together with and for our patients

This Clinical Strategy will enable us to deliver our Corporate Strategy and our ambition to become a ‘nationally recognised centre for excellence for integrated rural and coastal medicine and care’.

As a clinically led organisation our Collaboratives have been leading the development of this. 

Over the next year, we will turn this 5 year strategy into a programme of implementation. We will work with our teams and our partners to turn our ambition into reality to better serve our patients and communities.

As we move forward we want to make sure where improvements and transformations are required our patients are central to the review and re-design process and through co-production we can meet the expectations of our communities.

We have engaged with Our People, Our Patients and Our Communities adopting a co-design approach for this strategy.

Research, Learning and Continuous Improvement

At North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, (NCIC) we have a strong commitment to Research, Learning and Continuous Improvement. These offer opportunities for our staff to develop and maintain skills to provide high quality care for our patients and will be key areas in developing and delivering our strategies.

Over the next 5 years we will continue to develop a culture which promotes positive learning environments for our People, across all professional groups, to ensure they are equipped with the capabilities to develop their skills and see research, learning and continuous improvement as integral to their role. 

We commit to delivering the NHS Long Term Plan and work with partners across health and education to support new initiatives.

Our Research and Development Manager says:

“Over the next 5 years the NCIC research department’s strategic priorities are to both align ourselves with the national strategy of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and with the needs of our local population. Through research we aim to generate data that will allow leaders and policy makers to successfully advocate for our patients. We will help in the delivery of excellent clinical care by supporting innovation, and in the recruitment and retention of high calibre academic clinicians.”

Our key priorities are:

• To increase opportunities for patient participation both by streamlining our research processes and by creating a positive research culture within the organisation so that we are able to work at our full capacity to deliver NIHR portfolio projects.
• To develop the research workforce by providing research and training opportunities for healthcare professionals and researchers to develop their research skills and developing a clear career structure for the research workforce.
• Foster collaboration by continuing to support and develop our alliance-based approach to research work in North Cumbria. This includes ensuring the resilience of the primary care systems supported by NCIC research systems, continuing to support the role of the Direct Delivery Team in North Cumbria, and continuing to collaborate with other academic research and clinical partners in North Cumbria.
• We will seek opportunities to develop further partnerships and activities with existing and emerging clinical and research structures associated with North Cumbria.

PCSM Research Hub; co-Directors Professor Jonathan Weber CBE and Professor Sophie Day say:

“We have established a Research Hub at the new Pears Cumbria School of Medicine (PCSM), funded initially through the Imperial NIHR BioMedical Research Centre (BRC). The Research Hub will work in close collaboration with Imperial College, the University of Cumbria and with NCIC and other NHS Trusts in Cumbria.

“Starting in 2025, the Research Hub will fund research degrees, research projects and protected research time for clinicians and Nursing, Midwives and Allied Health Professionals at NCIC. We aim to build research partnerships between the NHS and PCSM, together with Cumberland Council and other Universities in NW England. A public Webinar series will commence in Q2 2025, showcasing medical research and clinical care at NCIC.”

Our Head of Nursing, Clinical Education and Practice Development says:

“We will support our nurses, midwives, allied health professionals and care support workers to access learning opportunities to advance their knowledge and skills to enable them to provide high quality, safe and effective care for our patients. 

“Working in partnership with our further and higher education providers we will provide quality placements and learning experiences for all our learners ensuring our future workforce has the knowledge and skills to provide exemplary care.”

Our shared purpose statement is:

We inspire and empower our staff and learners to develop and grow to confidently achieve their potential and provide high quality safe care.

Our Director of Medical Education says:

“NCIC NHS Foundation Trust is in a good place for Medical Education, and we are very proud of that. We now have the largest number of doctors in training and medical students ever, coming to join us in North Cumbria to work and learn. 

“We have moved out of a very challenged position to a strong and positive reputation for competence and quality within our region with increasingly positive outcomes and more opportunities for innovation and expansion coming our way.

“High quality clinical services go hand in hand with high quality learning programmes and environments, where the evidence shows that clinical outcomes improve where educational performance improves, and this also serves to make us a more attractive place for doctors to come and work with us in the long term.”

Pears Cumbria School of Medicine:

2025 sees the opening of the new Pears Cumbria School of Medicine, our partnership with the University of Cumbria and Imperial College, London. Over the next few years we will welcome these new postgraduate students into our services, supporting them to learn and develop towards obtaining their medical degree and qualifying as doctors. 

This is a major strategic step forward for NCIC and the wider Cumbria Health Care system, one which is designed to attract and retain doctors to Cumbria for the needs of Cumbria and part of our shared direction towards being a centre of excellence for rural and coastal medicine.

Our Approach

Our Clinical Strategy is designed to deliver the purpose, ambition and objectives set by our Board in our Corporate Strategy.

To develop this we used Population Health data from our experts and we listened to our people, our patients and our communities in the following ways: