Pounds of pressure
Tom Jackson, Chief Financial Officer, and Matt Greene, Programme Project Accountant of Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group, spoke at the recent CNO Summit. Here they reflect on the experiences they shared:
There is a relentless pressure on budgets and resources in Liverpool.
The city’s population is ageing and health outcomes are poor in many areas. NHS Liverpool CCG is leading on ‘Healthy Liverpool’, a city-wide transformation programme of health and social care to tackle these and many other issues.
Around £73million or 10% of Liverpool CCG’s annual financial allocation will be used to fund new ways of working by 2017-18 to achieve the ‘Healthy Liverpool’ vision.
Our vision is to deliver a whole system, comprehensive approach to health care and a key element of the programme will be to drive value through improved decision making – that is: what are we going to invest in and why?
Liverpool has some of the highest death rates from cancer in the UK and, earlier this year, we were selected as one of two organisations nationally to test a decision effectiveness tool (DET). Supported by Bain & Co, the CCG used the DET to make a major investment decision involving a Lung Cancer Outcomes pilot. The project was such a success that the DET has since been used to review proposals for services in other areas such as 7-day services and an investment in haemato-oncology services.
The toolkit has also been invaluable in engaging frontline staff in the decision making process. Kerry Lloyd, our Deputy Chief Nurse, summarises it well:
“Working within finite resources means that nurse leaders are often faced with difficult and challenging decisions – using BAIN as a tool to help determine the value of any proposal harnesses staff expertise and pragmatism. A workforce who understand the context in which a decision was reached and feel they have contributed to the process are often more supportive of change and its implementation.”
In our presentation at the CNO Summit, we talked through the Lung Cancer Pilot, how partner organisations and clinical staff have reacted and how feedback is being gathered in Liverpool to refine the tool nationally. We also shared some of the successes of our project and what we have learned so far, including how we are incorporating the decision-making toolkit into our governance processes to ensure value is at the heart of all decision making.
The theme of this year’s Summit was ‘Leading change and creating value’ and we believe using Bain has put us at the forefront of value-based commissioning and supports our development of models and initiatives in Liverpool.