We helped Trust leadership teams to understand their own service and performance and to compare their performance with the other Trusts.
Challenge
- Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire (BSW) Together Integrated Care System established the Acute Hospital Alliance (AHA) as an Acute Trust Provider Collaborative.
- The AHA brings together Royal United Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Bath, Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Swindon, and Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.
- The collaborative lacked capacity and expertise around programme management, strategy development, business intelligence and support to produce specific data packs required.
What we did
In 2022
- Our experienced programme director established a programme plan for the AHA clinical strategy workstream. Led on drafting the collaborative’s first clinical strategy and established an ongoing series of Clinical Summits. The Clinical Summits were regular, in-person events which brought together 50-60 clinical leaders from the three collaborating Trusts to build relationships, learn together and develop strategy and plans.
- We coordinated a 'Clinical Stocktake' process, where each Trust evaluated its services. The evaluations were compared to create a plan around which specialties and services should receive the earliest support in their collaboration efforts.
During 2023 our support continued:
- Providing a programme management resource to fill a maternity leave cover gap for the collaborative to help develop plans for collaboration, alignment and sharing of resources.
- Additional expertise to set up and run the AHA’s corporate services workstream from June 2023 to the end of March 2024, covering the main corporate services from across the three Acute Trusts; finance, HR, legal, governance, communications and engagement, estates, and facilities.
- A series of ‘deep dive data packs’ to support the BSW AHA clinical strategy specialty deep dive process. Using a collaborative approach, we managed the work needed to design, plan, carry out and playback the research and engagement providing:
- user research and engagement expertise
- research and engagement support
- analytical expertise
- geospatial support
The data packs brought together data from the three Trusts for each specialty and included snapshot data from the latest available sources for the identified clinical specialities:
- Standardised measures comparing the three Trusts and including relevant benchmarking -70% of the data
- Specialty-defined priority measures using both local and national indicators - determined in collaboration with the AHA subject matter experts – 30% of data
- Activity flows and mapping, including travel time mapping to 4 main sites
- Workforce details
User-friendly automated dashboards were established to enable the Trusts to take over ongoing management.
The data packs enabled the Trust leadership teams to understand their own service and performance and to compare their performance with the other two Trusts. They provided an important catalyst to help start conversations between the Trusts and learning from each other about their services and what they could do together.
Activity
System transformation
Developed a corporate services workstream supporting leaders of services across the three Trusts in the AHA who were asked to develop plans for how they could collaborate, join up and share resources.
Data-driven decision-making
Supported a series of ‘deep dive data packs’ to assist the BSW AHA clinical strategy specialty deep dive process so that Trust leadership teams could understand their own service and performance, and compare to the other two Trusts, providing an important catalyst to conversations about what they could do together.
Business Intelligence - Consultancy, strategy and transformation
Delivered a comprehensive programme plan to establish its clinical strategy workstream and drafted the Collaborative’s first clinical strategy.
Geospatial services
Provided geospatial support to play back the research as part of the deep dive data packs.
Impact
- With our support, the BSW AHA was able to:
- Develop its first Clinical Strategy
- Complete a Clinical Stocktake, which created a shared understanding about where resources should be focussed first, and which specialties should be prioritised for support from the programme.
- Design and plan an ongoing series of Clinical Summit events, to bring together leaders across the system to work together.
- Initiate and develop a corporate services workstream and develop plans for each of the corporate services across the Acute Hospital Alliance
- Learn and collaborate across their top clinical specialities through access to data packs for the specialties they wanted to work with. The flexibility for subject matter experts to customise data for a specialty within the packs was highly valued.
- In 2023 BSW AHA was chosen to be part of NHS England’s first Provider Collaborative Innovator scheme: NHS England » Accelerating the benefits of collaboration for patients and communities. This puts them amongst an advanced group of Provider Collaboratives in England.
- BSW AHA continues to value our expertise, our flexibility, our responsiveness to new demands and, most of all, our long-term partnership approach. We continue to maintain an ongoing relationship with the leadership team and to discuss future collaborative working where we can provide expertise and further data packs as needed.
