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Summary

Framework/Partnership // SBS Framework

Project Type // Strategic

Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust provides care across three acute sites, serving a population of 430,000 people. To maintain high standards of care, with over 90% of patients rating their experience as excellent, very good or good, the operation, management and development of the estate must reflect the same high standards.

The strategic planning process, which is a precursor to the allocation of all capital funding, requires that an organisation must have in place an estates strategy including a Development Control Plan (DCP) that sets the current and future plans for the estate. Furthermore, an estates strategy and DCP cannot sit in isolation, they must respond to service planning and must integrate with local commissioning and service strategies.

Service

Commissioned via the SBS Framework, the exi multidisciplinary team were appointed to provide a multidisciplinary technical advisory team to develop a clinical site strategy, to be used to frame the “Journey to Brilliant” programme and ensure that their clinical services respond to the strategic context, are located on the right site and are delivered in modern fit for purpose facilities…and support “Brilliant Care”.  

A series of engagement workshops were held to enable exi’s Project Management, Healthcare Planning and Service transformation advisors to develop the Trust’s Clinical Site Strategy and deliver strategic alignment with the ICS whilst producing an organisational service strategy and a size and scale of the future service based upon the best information available.

This approach generated three working sessions organised to cover the separate, but inter-related sets of issues requiring sequential development to generate the clinical site strategy and covered the following;

  • Meet the team along with service and site familiarisation, baseline ‘Current State’ and take receipt of “best information” available to inform exercise;
  • Future State mapping, How will we work in the future, demand management, the front door, admissions management, what role does the ICS need to play? What role will technology play? What can we learn from best practice, lessons learnt from peer groups and other ICS, reports such as Nuffield report rethinking the acute service? Frame the assumptions and data to generate the high-level planning assumptions (HLPAs).
  • Playback the HLPAs’ and confirm and challenge in advance of the production and presentation of the RCHT Clinical Site Strategy report.
  • The clinical site strategy sought to cover the following items;
  • Formulate a series of high-level planning assumptions that encapsulate key strategic and operational parameters to inform demand and capacity planning;
  • Estimate the future activity levels of the Trust across key points of delivery;
  • Assess the capacity requirement across PODs and across sites;
  • Investigate options for alternative means of service delivery and assess their impact on bed stock and clinical capacity;
  • Provide a high-level estimation of the spatial requirement for estate in the long-term (2030/31).

Added Value

Early Identification, empowerment and regular engagement with the key stakeholders maintained a cohesive, proactive and informed project team. Strengthened by a robust approach to partnership delivery. The undertaking of detailed project reviews including meeting with key stakeholders via workshop appraisals with the Trust, ensured the strategy was successfully developed ready for the next stage.

Outcomes

The output of this work has been a report which:

  • Establishes the background for the case for change, and identifies key demographic and operational issues facing the Trust over the planning period;