Case Study: Scoping efficiency opportunities for a community care provider
The PSC supported a large provider of community healthcare to identify over £4million of recurrent cost improvements, to be released over three years and to support quality and growth plans.
Our team worked collaboratively with staff in the corporate centre and across seven large business units to:
• Evaluate a long-list of existing cost improvement schemes
• Prioritise a short-list of the most impactful and practical schemes
• Model the indicative size of savings opportunity by scheme
• Develop a three-year delivery plan
Long-listing
We rapidly collated a long-list of approximately 25 cost improvement schemes that had been worked on across the organisation. In collaboration with internal leads, we evaluated all schemes against a common set of criteria – taking into account the scale of opportunity, deliverability and quality impact.
Short-listing
We assigned weightings and scores to these criteria to arrive at an overall ranking of schemes. This supported senior internal stakeholders to prioritise the seven schemes best placed to deliver the £4million savings over three years.
Opportunity sizing
With input from internal leads, we developed the evidence-base for each of the cost improvement schemes. This involved articulating and testing cost improvement assumptions for each prioritised scheme, and bringing together complex finance and activity datasets. Using agreed methodologies, such as internal benchmarking of clinical productivity, we modelled an indicative range of savings opportunity for each scheme.
Delivery planning
Based on an internationally recognised framework first developed in the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, we assessed the likelihood of delivery of each scheme and set out next steps for each. This enabled us to devise an overall implementation plan, strategically phased over three years. Built into this plan were programme-wide recommendations to ensure successful delivery; these included setting up an expert panel to act as a “clinical conscience” and uphold care quality and safety standards throughout.
Outcome
Our client took ownership of a clearly defined and coherent set of cost improvement opportunities which could deliver £4m recurrent cost improvements, supported by a practical implementation and engagement plan for moving forward into mobilisation.
The value of The PSC’s expert and professional approach shone through in feedback:
‘The PSC have developed something coherent in just a few weeks in our complicated business, which is impressive.’
The PSC have been ‘extraordinarily good’, ‘very amenable’ and ‘perfect for the job’.