Strategic goal 5: We will continue our improvement journey to deliver an outstanding Service

Our journey to outstanding will involve the whole organisation in working together to improve the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the work we do.

Community focus

We are focused on providing the best possible services to meet the needs of our communities.

To do this, we need to be effective in gathering and using information about the risks and needs within our communities. This is an area of continual improvement, as we upgrade our systems and processes to enable better analysis, and to ensure we are able to share relevant information with the staff who are delivering our services.

Equality, diversity and inclusion

We believe that a greater understanding of our communities and a richer, more diverse workforce will enable us to deliver better community outcomes.

As a public sector organisation, we have a statutory obligation under the Public Sector Equality Duty, within the Equality Act, to have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations between different people when carrying out our activities.

We do this in many ways. For example, we are supporters of Nottinghamshire Pride and we use our social media accounts to promote equality and diversity issues. We continually strive to improve our understanding of our diverse communities, and to educate and develop our staff.

We are committed to providing equality of access to all our services and routinely impact assess any changes we make to our services or ways of working.

Quality, efficiency and effectiveness

A significant part of becoming an outstanding service is embracing a continuous improvement ethos.

We have robust processes in place to review and learn from our experiences attending incidents. We also draw in learning and best practice from other fire services and sector bodies.

We are working to embed this approach into our wider business processes. Throughout the life of this plan, we will critically evaluate the way that we work and the outcomes we deliver, and we will make changes where these will improve our performance.

We will continue to build and develop our performance management culture.

Digital technology and innovation

We want our staff to have access to the right information, on the right device, at the right times, and have the skills to use the technology effectively. We aim to improve our use of digital technology, to enhance how we work and deliver better access to our services.

Collaboration

We have a statutory duty to actively consider opportunities to collaborate with other blue-light services, and other local and national partners where this would improve the efficiency or effectiveness of services to the public.

We have strategic collaborations with Nottinghamshire Police, EMAS and with neighbouring fire and rescue services, some of which are highlighted elsewhere in this plan.

We also engage with a range of other partners, including local councils, health and social care agencies and voluntary sector organisations. These collaborations take many forms, from the sharing of resources and information to efficiency improvements which provide more effective community outcomes

Our commitments

Community focus

We will:

• Use our Strategic Assessment of Risk and Fire Cover Review to prioritise the services we provide and align our resources to best effect. We will update our assessment of risk each year
• Provide all our public-facing teams with the relevant information about the risks and needs of communities they work with, to enable them to engage effectively and make every contact count
• Be proactive in consulting and involving community groups, particularly from underrepresented or ‘seldom heard’ groups, when developing our services

Equality, diversity and inclusion

We will continue to:

• Engage with our service users to ensure that we meet their needs, that our services are accessible and that our relationships with communities are strong
• Maintain our commitment to driving equality through our work with external agencies, such as the Disability Confidence scheme, British Sign Language Charter and the Armed Forces Covenant
• Undertake equality impact assessments so that we understand how our activities and policies may impact our service users and workforce, and address any specific issues

Quality, efficiency and effectiveness

We will continue to:

• Develop our use of evaluation techniques to routinely assess the impact of our activities, to improve community outcomes
• Develop our management information and data analysis capability to support performance monitoring and decision making
• Improve our business planning processes, to ensure we are able to prioritise our activities and maximise their benefits
• Proactively seek to implement improvements identified through public inquiries and sector learning
• Adopt new national fire standards as they are published by the Fire Standards Board, to ensure we are working to sector best practice

We will:

• Modify selected business processes to improve efficiency and effectiveness

Digital technology and innovation

We will continue to:

• Maintain a resilient information, communication and technology (ICT) infrastructure, with a rolling programme of hardware upgrades and replacements
• Maintain the security of our systems and data, retaining our Cyber Essentials accreditation
• Progress the implementation of the Emergency Services Network
• Improve the ICT skills of our workforce, ensuring that all staff are able to use systems effectively
• Improve the availability of our systems to allow for increased mobile working
• Ensure our systems are accessible for all

We will:

• Make processes digital, where possible, to reduce paperwork and improve efficiency
• Make services more accessible through our website and digital technologies

Collaboration

We will continue to:

• Look for opportunities to further develop existing collaborations or explore new arrangements where there is a clear business case for doing so