Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides a wide range of community, mental health and learning disability services for people across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.
We provide most of the NHS services that are delivered away from the big acute hospitals – in peoples homes, communities and in local hospitals and clinics.
We have a team of over 13,000 staff who work from over 500 sites across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. We serve a population of around 2 million people, with care available for every stage of their lives.
Our aim is to work alongside the people we support and our health and care partners, to provide outstanding care that helps people live their best and healthiest lives.
We are a University Hospital Trust. This means we have been nationally recognised as being dedicated to providing high quality, holistic and evidence-based care. It also means we commit significant resources and investment in research and have a keen focus on the educational development and training of our current and future workforces.
Our values define the way we want to work, the way we want to treat each other and the people we support.
We embarked on a collaborative journey to find the right values for our new organisation. Through staff engagement sessions, leadership events, and an engagement campaign, we gathered invaluable feedback from staff, service users, and community partners which ultimately evolved into our CARE values: Compassion, Accountability, Respect and Excellence.
- Compassion – We listen, we are kind, and put the needs of people first
- Accountability – We work together openly and responsibly
- Respect – We treat each person fairly as an individual
- Excellence – We empower people to continuously improve care
The Trust was formed in October 2024 after the services provided by Solent NHS Trust; Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust; community, mental health and learning disability services provided by Isle of Wight NHS Trust; and child and adolescent mental health services provided by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust in Hampshire came together to form Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
As a new Trust we have yet to be fully inspected by the CQC. However, the services that form the new Trust from the previous organisations have been inspected and you can find these on the CQC’s website: www.cqc.org.uk
The CQC rating for one of the previous Trusts, Southern Health, will continue to be displayed until the new Trust is inspected. This is because Southern Health was the ‘acquiring Trust’ in the merger. When the new Trust is inspected, a new CQC rating under the new Trust’s name will be generated and displayed.
Across Hampshire and Isle of Wight, lots of organisations are involved in helping people with their health and care needs. These organisations are all working together to give people the best experience and improve the health and wellbeing of all our communities. All these organisations working together are called the health and care system.
In this system, our main role is to help people get the care they need away from big acute hospitals. We do this by helping to prevent ill health, and delivering community care closer to where people live. We are the main provider of mental health care for people of all ages, from talking therapies to specialist hospital treatment.
We work closely with other health and care partners in the system. They include other NHS Trusts, local GPs, the Integrated Care Board, local authorities, voluntary, charity and social enterprise organisations and local communities.
Because we are the only NHS Trust that works across the whole of Hampshire and Isle of Wight, and because we provide such a wide range of services, we have a really good picture of the health and wellbeing needs of our diverse communities. This means we can help to shape the way care is planned and delivered, to make people’s experience of using the local NHS better and more joined up.
Over the past 18 months, we've been working hard with colleagues, patients, service users and partners to align our mental health, community and learning disability services across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight from Solent NHS Trust, Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, as well as the community, mental health and learning disability services previously provided by Isle of Wight NHS Trust, and the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services previously provided in Hampshire by Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust. All of this saw us officially become Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare on October 1, 2024.
For some background on why we did this you can read more here. You can also view our top FAQs here and watch this animation on our journey to becoming Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare.
We will continue to share regular updates on our journey via our News pages. If you have any concerns, questions or feedback, please email getintouch@hiowhealthcare.nhs.uk
Bringing our services together will improve consistency of care between these services and the organisations which are currently responsible for different parts of peoples’ care. It will also make sure people have the same access to services and experience the same health outcomes. We believe that working even more closely together is the right approach for the benefit of our patients, their families, and our communities. Coming together will also continue to enable our staff to work together to best meet the needs of patients and help us to recruit and retain staff more easily, offering wider career progression and development opportunities.
In the short-term we do not anticipate any significant changes to local services. They will continue to be provided in each local area by the same teams. However, our clinical teams will be taking a close look at services provided across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight and sharing information about what is working well and what improvements need to be made. This will consider both clinical data as well as feedback from service users and local communities. If any changes are needed, discussions will take place with all those affected before these are put in place.
One of the recommendations in the independent review, which was undertaken to explore these proposals, was to review the use of community beds across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. This will be explored further as part of the next phases of the programme, working in partnership with colleagues from the Integrated Care Board and local partners providing hospital based (acute) services.
Absolutely. Local care is central to patients’ health outcomes, and this will not change. Our vision is Our vision is that together we deliver outstanding care that supports people to live their best and healthiest lives.
A clinical delivery group was set up led by senior clinicians from all the organisations involved. This group of operational and clinical leaders is supporting the clinical planning that will help ensure people have equal access to care services and the same experience and health outcomes. A clinical strategy has been developed and can be viewed here.
Our patients, service users, partners, carers and families have also been a huge part of this process. We have hosted many engagement sessions with our local patient and carer groups and with our community partners.
We are now developing our Trust strategy and recently held a survey open to all to get feedback on what matters most to them. Our strategic priorities are the most important things that we need to do, that will make the biggest difference to our patients and communities. This is ongoing with workshops now under way to co-design our strategy with our communities to help shape our future and our local health services. Find out more here and other ways you can still be involved. We value your input.