- Cheshire and Merseyside Acute and Specialist Trusts Collaborative (CMAST) is a large provider collaborative, starting as 13 trusts, with an overarching aim to support delivery and service improvement for patients across the system by reducing unwarranted variation and maximising equity of access.
- CMAST is funded through a mix of channels with some money coming through national programmes for diagnostics and elective recovery. Other income comes from integrated care board (ICB) transformation funding and there is also a contribution from each of the collaborative's providers.
- CMAST have agreed areas of focus and delivery with their ICB which also align with national priorities. Priorities include elective recovery and transformation, increasing diagnostic activity and capacity, as well as clinical pathway reviews and efficiency at scale.
- CMAST have a provider leadership board approach with a committee in common (CiC) to support decision making.
- The elective recovery and transformation programme was established from a necessity to reduce waiting times for treatment following the immediate impact of the pandemic. The providers agreed that it was imperative to collaborate to share resources, provide support and facilitate mutual aid to ensure urgent patients still received treatment and as much elective care continued as possible.
- The elective recovery work is underpinned by weekly monitoring of waiting times across the system, fostering a shared responsibility for reducing variation in wait times between providers.
- CMAST has coordinated the delivery of significant achievements in both its elective recovery and diagnostics programme through combining resource, utilising programme funding and jointly funding a programme team to lead the collaboration across these key areas.
- The CMAST diagnostics programme includes all diagnostic tests such as pathology, imaging, endoscopy, screening programmes, cardiorespiratory, neurophysiology and covers 70 tests for patients of all ages across mental and physical healthcare.
- Clinical leadership is key to supporting system-wide delivery and change. For CMAST this has resulted in diagnostics successes underpinned by clinical leadership in endoscopy, imaging and pathology.
- Increased capacity and patient choice have been delivered through 10 new community diagnostic centres meaning people can have multiple tests done at one appointment which is helping to get a diagnosis faster.
- Across all CMAST programmes there is a very strong 'system first' attitude and culture that comes from the senior responsible owners (SROs) of the programmes, this helps to galvanise support from all chief executives and chairs and their teams, who are all engaged and supportive of the programmes and see them as both helpful and critical enablers.