NHS foundation trust 2010-11 annual planning

The Annual Plan Review (APR) in 2010-11 has been redesigned and enhanced to reflect some of the main and evolving challenges over the next three years. The completion by NHS foundation trusts of an integrated plan for submission to Monitor now requires:

  • more detailed consideration of key financial inputs and drivers and their likely impacts, delivering integrated financial forecasts;
  • clear strategic priorities, risks, actions and accountabilities linked to the trust’s overall vision, its main strategic ambitions and always underpinning its clinical quality objectives and financial plans; and
  • input and ownership of the plan across all key areas of the business and, as appropriate, engagement with key external stakeholders.

This revised planning process should better enable trusts to understand and then describe their strategy, key priorities and how they will be delivered, and the incumbent forward risks, both internal and external.

In our FT Bulletin (November 2009) we identified that the completed plan will provide less of a marketing opportunity than in previous years but should demonstrate more clearly to Monitor and other key stakeholders that the planning process undertaken has been carefully thought through and completed, has considered all key parts of the trust’s operations and how these interact, and is built from bottom up assumptions. 

Whether NHS foundation trusts can demonstrate that they are undertaking effective planning for the future will form an important part of Monitor’s assessment of risk to the Authorisation. 

Further information about the Annual Plan Review is available here.

APR Frequently Asked Questions

Below is a document containing answers to common questions received by Monitor. This document will be updated on a regular basis.

Download APR Frequently Asked Questions

APR Template

Below is a copy of the Annual Plan Review template. This is an Excel 2007 file and you will require Excel 2007 to open the file.

Download Annual Plan Review template 2010-11

APR Fixer

Whenever an issue with the Annual Plan Review (APR) template is highlighted to Monitor, we will:

1. Update the APR Fixer on this website
2. Update the APR templates stored on MARS

This approach means that:

  • any FTs which have not started working on their APR can take the version on MARS as the most up to date version of the template;
  • but FTs which have started working on their APRs can apply the APR Fixer and bring their version up to date without losing any work.
    APR Fixers will be updated on Mondays.

Download APR Template Fixer File - 26 May 2010
Download Schedule 2 Template Fixer File - 12 May 2010
Download Governance and Service Performance Template - 19 April 2010

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