Efficiency and Sustainability

The challenge

Whilst the NHS has agreed a long-term financial settlement, the focus during the next 10 years on delivering sustainability and transformation plans means that making efficiency savings will continue to be a key priority for health and care organisations.

Some organisations have taken drastic measures to balance in-year savings. This can have an adverse impact on quality and consequently costs creep back. As with weight control, this sort of crash diet may shed the pounds quickly, but the results are usually short-lived.

Other organisations have successfully delivered efficiencies thus far but are now struggling to know where and how they will find further savings in the coming years.

To address these challenges, organisations are increasingly seeking longer-term transformational approaches, endorsed in the NHS Long Term Plan by forging partnerships to look at the whole system optimisation as Integrated Care Services for the local population.

This new perspective (akin to a lifestyle change) can deliver efficiency savings, which address how the whole system functions more effectively rather than how money is spent, ultimately enabling more sustainable transformation.

Our solution

Our experienced professionals can offer support across a range of areas, bringing new ideas and evidence-based opportunities; identifying opportunities to instil a culture of improving efficiency and most importantly, providing practical 'hands on' support to ensure efficiencies are effectively delivered.

This includes:

Situation Assessment - Understanding the current position within the organisation/system, reviewing all existing material and work as well as assessing internal capabilities to deliver change.

Opportunity Generation - Gathering a range of new ideas (tactical and strategic) from internal and external sources, quantified and populated in an opportunity database.

Prioritisation - Assessing and agreeing ideas to take forward with rationale, detailing underlying assumptions made and supported by mini PIDs (Project Initiation Documentation).

Planning and Delivery - Working with and/or providing additional PMO capacity and supporting tools to embed and accelerate pace of delivery.

Systems and Processes - Reviewing, and if necessary, enhancing existing arrangements around the planning, delivery and tracking of efficiencies within the organisation/system.

Benefits

  Quality efficiencies
Delivery of changes that improve patient experience and outcomes as well as realising financial savings.

  Win-win for the system
Working transparently across all partner organisations (commissioner and provider) to develop a shared system financial sustainability plan.

  Delivery assurance
Critical appraisal of the robustness of existing plans and processes, assessing and addressing any gaps.

  New opportunities
Bringing fresh ideas from other health and care systems as well as other industries.

  Engaged workforce
Adopting a quality improvement approach, recognising that purely focusing on finances not only drives the wrong behaviours but also disengages the workforce.

  Internal capability
Providing a knowledge transfer of skills to your staff, boosting internal capability to continually deliver sustained improvements.

Why we're different

We are proud to be part of the NHS family
We are unique in providing services that represent value for money, with profits reinvested into the NHS as part of our joint venture with the Department of Health and Social Care.

Our Capability
Our team has a unique blend of extensive healthcare and commercial expertise, which is complemented with support and assurance from our wider business, including specialist VAT advisory, BI analytics, and leading edge digital tech solutions from our parent company Sopra Steria to create a "one stop shop" to support your needs.

Flexibility
Our services combine to create true flexibility, supporting whole-system transformation in the format you need to enable manageable patient outcome improvement and value for money.

Organisational Knowledge
When you work with NHS SBS you don't just get the benefit of the knowledge and experience of the team assigned to your project. You get the benefit of our collective knowledge and learning from our work with a wide variety of health and care commissioners and providers.

Consistency, resilience and governance
Working with our team ensures that there will be a consistent approach, boosting resilience and improving governance and control.

Track Record
We have delivered audited savings of over £400 million to our NHS clients and our Healthcare Improvement Solutions team has an outstanding record of customer satisfaction.

What our customers think

"Working with health and care systems to develop a joint financial efficiency plan."

Interested to know more?