North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust (NCIC) is creating a centre of excellence in providing rural and remote healthcare and provides a wide range of community and acute services to patients throughout north Cumbria and beyond.
Our 6,000 strong workforce is led by clinical and support staff who are helping to shape our strategy for the future with a focus on integration, improving the wellbeing of our patients and providing excellent services for our population. We are passionate about our values of kindness, respect, ambition and collaboration and want NCIC to be a great place for everyone to work. We have five key principles that we believe are vital to deliver ‘safe, high quality care every time’.
- Being a clinically-led organisation
- Quality and safety at the heart
- A positive patient experience every time
- A great place to work
- Managing our money well
Significant investment is improving the services we are able to offer for patients. In addition to the new £35m cancer centre that will open in summer 2021 at Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle in partnership with Newcastle Hospitals; the Trust has secured £40m investment to deliver phase two of the project to redevelop West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven. It will bring a huge upgrade in facilities for both patients and staff creating a better environment while retaining bed capacity and services for the site and improving the capacity to undertake additional planned operations there in the future.
As well as our acute hospital services, eight Integrated Care Communities (ICCs) were set up in 2018 and since their inception, relationships have been built between a wide range of health and care partners (including health and social care professionals, GPs, the voluntary and third sector and the community) which has helped us to join up how we work together to improve services for patients locally. The ICCs enable us to care for more people at home or in community settings and prevent people staying in acute hospitals longer than necessary.
We have strong links with local universities in Cumbria providing high quality placements for students as well as good relationships with our partners meaning we can offer a vast range of unique careers at NCIC. We have the rurality and beauty of Cumbria and the Lake District on our doorstep but equally we can be in major cities within a couple of hours providing the best of both worlds.
Our stories of excellence and innovation
Hospitals for the future
A new £35m cancer centre named the Northern Centre for Cancer Care, North Cumbria has been built on the Cumberland Infirmary site and is a partnership between NCIC and Newcastle Hospitals. This will mean that more people can access care closer to home, improving cancer services for patients all over north Cumbria.
The new centre boasts:
- two linear accelerator radiotherapy machines
- a chemotherapy day unit with 15 treatment chairs and three single treatment rooms
- a CT scanner suite
- consultation, examination rooms and a small café area
- multipurpose rooms for complementary therapies and patient support
The exciting project has created a modern state-of-the-art environment for staff, patients, carers and their relatives. It also brings all Cumberland Infirmary’s non-surgical oncology services under the same roof so patients will no longer have to receive chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment in different parts of the hospital.
