Our Transformation Unit helped develop a new model of care for acute services at a health and social care partnership alliance.

Background
Cheshire East Partnership is an alliance of health and social care partners (two acute trusts, commissioners, community service providers, one mental health provider, local authority and primary care), that are working together to improve the health and wellbeing of the population of Cheshire East Place (approximate population of 378,000)​.

Cheshire East Place is facing a range of challenges in respect of delivering sustainable health and care services. Key issues faced by acute providers include increasing demand from an older and frailer population, falling demand for some services, financial challenges, workforce challenges and some less resilient services.

Cheshire East Place needed to develop a new model of care for acute services that was aligned with the process for development of the integrated care partnership and redesign of integrated community services.

NHS ML’s Transformation Unit was commissioned to support Cheshire East Place with the redesign of acute services across two acute trusts to meet the needs of the Cheshire East population.

Action
This programme of work was delivered under the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. It required exceptional flexibility and adaptability to deliver a clinical redesign programme with limited capacity from the clinical community. Key deliverables for this programme included: ​

• Confirmation of programme scope – an alignment piece designed to reach agreement between partners about the scope and desired outcomes​
• Decision-making and governance framework to set out the process for approval​
• Data analysis on the current services and population health needs to enable articulation of the Case for Change​
• A clinically-led process of designing a new model of care for acute services ​
• Baseline activity and finance model to inform future options​
• Design of an options development approach ​
• Communications and engagement strategy and support for patient and public engagement​.

Impact

Under challenging circumstances for the clinical community we delivered a co-produced Model of Care that describes acute services within the context of an integrated care model.

Engagement and support from across acute clinical, social care, community and primary care professionals was strong with consensus reached on what future services should look like and what they should collectively strive to achieve in terms of quality, accessibility and sustainability.