The three NHS trusts providing community services in North West London (NWL) are working together as a provider collaborative to take forward their shared strategic agenda, which involves:
- A commitment to delivering a consistent core offer for 'any place' to reduce unwarranted variation across NWL.
- Standardising service specifications for all NHS-funded community services across the integrated care system.
- Identifying and driving through service change and improvement through improved productivity.
Action taken
Upon its formation, the provider collaborative started to standardise data across the providers to ensure that each one was coding activity correctly and consistently. The provider collaborative team also went through a process to improve their data quality, validating the data with the providers' clinical and operational teams, which also helped to get buy in from these teams.
Historical activity and workforce data was obtained for the previous three years, and this information was aligned to what was happening on the ground by mapping service and activity data to the appropriate workforce teams.
Taking a scenario-based approach, the collaborative considered the evidence base for investment and clinical change and encouraged clinical teams and senior leaders from each trust to consider the achievable improvements they could make in their own services, as well as at an organisational level. They also considered ambitious and aspirational scenarios to help them identify opportunities which could release capacity that could be redeployed to improve other areas of clinical activity.
Outcomes and impact
The NWL Community Collaborative found that by focusing on a more ambitious clinically led approach, they are now able to provide 95,000 more contacts and see 12,000 more patients, which is a 15% increase in direct patient facing time, but all within the same staff headcount.
They reflect that this impact has been possible due to:
- Bringing the clinical and operational teams together to establish shared productivity goals.
- Bringing in the corporate teams (business intelligence and finance) of each provider together at an early stage to generate a renewed focus on productivity.
- Having an evidence base to work from to give trust executives confidence in the programme.
The North West London Community Collaborative's partner organisations are Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust and West London NHS Trust. See further detail on this programme here.