helping a team transform health & social care

Taking a health and social care team through an radical experiment, enthuses the Chief Exec and Directors of the NHS Trust

There is a team of front line health workers, fmor a County Council and the NHS, that are working in a radically different way to the rest of their colleagues. For 9 months now they have experimented with a trial where they take demands from the community, and deal with them in a very different way to the standard rules. The team took resposibility of the workflow, from end to end, and were allowed to make decisions on what and how they undertook activities. Their goal was to help that person to get them back to as normal state as possible - based on what the problems are to solve.
It is great to help them with a methodology, and see how their understanding of what they need to do differently emerges.

What the team achieved

The effect that the team had on 32 individuals was striking:

• The number of assessments, down 64%
• No of people involved end to end, down 32%
• No of referrals, down 41%

At this point the Directors and everyone else assumed that the team had achieved this by spending more time and resources on those people, but this is what the figures were:

• Total number of hours spent on the cases, down 14%
• Face to face time as a percentage of total time,  from 46% to 60%

And to demonstrate that the team were focused on the right thing, they predicted that:

• The estimate of that demand returning into the system, from 71% to 0%

Naturally the Directors were stunned, and the Chief Exec said "This is how I want my health servoce to be like"

A great testament to the team and hteir approach. Lets wait to see in 2020 what they manage to achieve!

How they did this

The team took 35 cases and used a methodology that was based on Systems Thinkig to design their service from a completely diffrerent perspective. They had a manager conneted to them to help them clear the barriers in their way, and to help them to ensure that decisions could be delegated safely.

Health & social care experiment