The Lancashire and South Cumbria Provider Collaboration Board (PCB) is a formal joint working and delegation arrangement between the five NHS providers of acute, mental health, community, and specialist services in the Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System (ICS):
- Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
- Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust
- Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust
The vision of the PCB is to "work together as one with a culture of continuous improvement", with the aim of "driving up quality by sharing skills and best practice, pooling resources and standardising ways of working to reduce variation and duplication".
One of the key drivers for collaboration was the commitment to more streamlined and faster decision-making to enable better patient outcomes and drive up the quality of care.
The PCB seeks to provide NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care Board (ICB), NHS England, local authorities, and the wider ICS with a single, collective trust view on proposals for service change. It also exists to develop shared clinical and other services, support financial stability and sustainability through reduced duplication and better use of existing resources, and to implement, manage and oversee shared corporate services.
The PCB has agreed to seven principles which guide the work of the collaborative:
- Work together as one structured system to achieve excellence.
- Have a trusting, transparent and open approach.
- Share data and best practice, learning together when things go wrong.
- Build a positive, aspirational culture based on continuous improvement.
- Encourage our staff to be creative, innovative, and aspirational in what we want to achieve for our population and for each other.
- Be inclusive, ensuring joint working between the NHS, local authorities, the voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise (VCFSE) sector, and private providers.
- Work as part of the Lancashire and South Cumbria system.
Following mutual aid arrangements in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the leaders of the five trusts began to discuss mechanisms to enable greater collaboration. Following extensive engagement with the individual trust boards, all the trusts agreed to form a joint committee structure to formalise their collaborative working arrangements and to commit to collective decision-making. The formation of the joint committee and the delegation of powers was ratified by the ICB in December 2022.
The joint committee allows the PCB to make decisions on key programmes of work agreed by trust boards. These key programmes each have a board or group which reports into the PCB. These are:
- The clinical programme board, which has responsibility for the delivery of the three main provider collaborative clinical change programmes; reconfiguration and centralisation of a number of specialist services; increasing resilience within four of their most fragile services; and development of their long-term hospital configuration blueprint and three-year delivery plan.
- The central services executive sub-committee, which oversees the move to bring together services, drawn from a number of corporate functions, into a shared service hosted by one of the partners in the PCB. Good progress has already been made in setting up a shared bank and agency workforce service and delivering savings from procurement, shared contracts, and the introduction of a standard rate for bank nurses. The PCB is anticipating this work will deliver a financial benefit to the system this financial year.
- The elective recovery programme board, which is responsible for six transformation programmes, all supporting the ambition of managing waiting lists and capacity 'as one' and optimising the capacity available within elective care. The programme also oversees the expansion of surgical hub capacity.
- The pathology network board is overseeing the development of the Lancashire and South Cumbria pathology service.