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).The collaborative's elective recovery programme board wanted to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the mutual aid process by increasing the number of mutual aid transfers before a patient attends their first outpatient appointment.
Action taken
Since the start of 2023/24, all four acute providers in Lancashire and South Cumbria ICS 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 was devised by a demand and capacity coordination team bringing together operational, performance and business intelligence leads from across the collaborative and is now beginning to change how the collaborative's mutual aid process runs.
The group were very keen to ensure that the tool was understood and had buy-in from each provider through their chief operating officer. The tool was also taken on a 'presentation roadshow' to wider groups of operational managers at each trust to explain to people why and how the tool was developed and the value it brings. This was crucial, as the introduction of the tool meant a change to business as usual for colleagues and if the teams at each trust did not buy in, it would be challenging to achieve maximum impact.
Outcomes and impact
The elective recovery programme team believes that the tool's success stems from the collective effort in its creation and the shared contribution to its methodology. This collaborative approach is essential for ensuring that each provider effectively acts on the insights it generates. A diverse group of colleagues, including those from business intelligence, performance, and operational leadership across the providers, has been involved in both the tool's development and its methodology. The process has been entirely iterative and built on strong collaboration.
The provider collaborative can now identify whether there is a need for a system response earlier than was previously the case. The use of data enables mutual aid discussions to be more objective and can give providers greater levels of assurance that they are not passing performance challenges to one another.
The Lancashire and South Cumbria Provider Collaboration Board's partner organisations are Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust, Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. You can read more about their work here.