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The vision of the Lancashire and South Cumbria Provider Collaborative Board (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".
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The PCB seeks to provide a single, collective trust view on proposals for service change and to develop shared clinical and other services, as well as support financial stability and sustainability through reduced duplication and better use of existing resources.
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Following extensive engagement with the individual trust boards, all the trusts agreed to form a joint committee structure to formalise the collaborative working arrangements and to commit to collective decision-making. The joint committee allows the PCB to make decisions on the key programmes of work agreed by the trust boards; clinical services, corporate services, elective recovery and pathology network programmes.
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Since the start of 2023/24, all four acute providers in Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System and the collaborative have worked together to develop a 65-week system capacity and demand forecasting tool that can help indicate specialities at risk of not achieving the 65-week waiting time standard in the future. The tool is now beginning to change how the collaborative's mutual aid process runs and was devised by a demand and capacity coordination team bringing together operational, performance and business intelligence leads from across the collaborative.
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Applying a data-driven approach enables mutual aid discussions to be more objective, providing trusts with greater levels of assurance that they're not unintentionally passing a performance challenge from one provider to another.
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The co-production of the tool has helped bring the providers closer together and the provider collaborative can now identify whether there is a need for a system response earlier than was previously the case.