Our annual meeting: Join us online
Our 2024-25 annual general meeting and annual members' meeting will be held online this year.
Everybody is welcome to join the virtual meeting on Microsoft Teams from 2 to 3.30pm on Wednesday, 17 September.
- Hear how we have looked after the health of people living in Kent, Medway, East Sussex and London during the past year.
- Read our annual report for 2024/2025.
- Meet our newly elected Lead Governor as we review the past year and look forward to the future.
Watch the AGM
Register to watch the AGM on Microsoft Teams
Community first: How we make an impact
We deliver 2.2 million contacts each year, through more than 70 different services to communities across Kent and Medway, East Sussex and parts of London.
This year we have shown that, through partnership working and a genuine focus on system-wide priorities and a ‘community first’ approach, we can make a real difference.
Our collaboration with Kent County Council to launch early support service Home First has helped people back to living as independently as possible, in their own home.
From October 2024 to March 2025, Home First carried out 680 face-to-face or virtual appointments.
After joining forces with acute partners and SECAmb, to provide multi-disciplinary clinical navigation hubs that remotely monitor patients in live ambulance calls, we have helped reduce weekly hospital admissions for complex frail patients from 80 to 50.
And our work with GPs and primary care networks continues to shape what we need to do as integrated neighbourhood teams in the future. We have a deeper understanding of the needs of our population and the risks to their health, or deterioration from known long-term conditions. This has enabled a targeted approach to supportive care, where we can respond appropriately and enable people to stay at home.
Read our annual report for a snapshot of our work from April 2024 to March 2025 and how we measure our success against our four key ambitions:
- Better patient experience
- Putting communities first
- A great place to work
- Sustainable care
Better patient experience
Our focus remains on improving waiting times and the quality of care delivered across our services, as well as our commitment to keeping people out of hospital and treated in the comfort of their home.
We are achieving this through new approaches and ways of working, often in collaboration with system partners, for the benefit of our patients.
Our Home First partnership with Kent County Council was launched in Ashford and Dover in October 2024 and saw significant recruitment to roles. Home First aims to provide support to people on discharge from hospital, or who are at risk of being admitted.
The service can take can take the patient on the same day of referral and after an average length of stay on the case load of 19 days, 42 per cent of patients were discharged as self-managing.
Putting communities first
Everyone has the same opportunity to lead a healthy life, no matter where they live or who they are.
Educating and increasing our understanding of the needs of our population, the barriers to care and the differences in people’s experience and outcomes, continues to play a major role in our progress to tackle health inequalities.
Our public health bus visited fishing communities to offer on-the-spot health checks during the summer and autumn of 2024. We spoke to 54 fishermen and carried out 15 health checks which resulted in 22 clinical interventions.
A great place to work
Our colleagues are diverse, look forward to coming to work, achieve their full potential and feel pride in a job well done.
Key areas of focus to support our breakthrough objectives this year were centred around improving the experiences of colleagues with long-term health conditions, maximising staff voice and introducing new ways to support our managers and leaders.
Our targeted NHS Staff Survey campaign in 2024 saw us receive our highest response rate ever for the second year in a row, with 70 per cent (3,582) of our colleagues taking part in the survey.
This is one of the highest response rates among provider trusts in the country and paints a rich picture of what it’s like to work for KCHFT.
We recorded a 90 per cent score for colleagues who believe their role makes a difference to patients and eight out of 10 staff would feel happy with the standard of care for a friend or relative.
Sustainable care
Automation is continuing to help KCHFT teams and services reduce time spent on admin and give colleagues more time with patients.
By using software ‘flobots’ to complete basic digital tasks, such as opening documents, compiling reports and completing forms.
Our Health Visiting Service has saved 10,080 hours admin time per year thanks to a revamp of how forms are completed.
Since the new method was launched, the family-focused team spends 11 minutes less filling-in all newborn forms, three minutes less completing antenatal paperwork and one minute less on each six-to-eight-week check form.
