The 10-Year Health Plan has set ambitious transformation goals, but how can NHS corporate functions deliver genuine excellence while operating with constrained budgets?
- Constraint drives innovation when people are engaged. David Furness shared how financial pressure is generating unprecedented innovation: “If you engage people in the problem and give them the information to improve services, they will do it.” The key is to view staff as innovators and problem solvers.
- Design workforce systems for people, not just as data warehouses. Danny Mortimer revealed how 25-year-old systems designed for data collection now create daily friction for staff. The solution? Start with user experience. Sussex’s shift to “anytime” payroll processing improved both accuracy and staff morale, proving that better systems reduce rather than increase costs.
- Procurement teams need strategic involvement, not just good intentions. Alice Donovan-Hart highlighted how under-resourced procurement teams often find themselves limited to transactional, rules-based tasks. In Norfolk & Waveney, efforts to shift toward a more strategic, system-wide approach, including unified procurement across five trusts, have identified potential long-term savings of £7.3 million. These projected efficiencies stem from coordinated purchasing and shared decision-making, not increased budgets.
- Build AI trust from back office to front line. Mark Jennings offered a practical framework – mastering administrative automation before patient-facing applications. For example, starting with ‘hidden’ services like finance and procurement, before rolling out AI to those that are patient-facing, like bookings for appointments and transport. NHS SBS’s Ada bot exemplifies this, cutting referral processing from 40 minutes to five minutes whilst building organisational confidence in digital transformation.
- Operational data combined with clinical data reveals patient needs better than clinical data alone. The panel identified the “holy trinity” of clinical, operational, and workforce data. Mark noted: “You understand patient needs and behaviours more from operational data than clinical data,” creating opportunities for truly patient-centred transformation.
The counterintuitive finding that changes everything
Mark Jennings cited Strasys’ research that has challenged conventional wisdom, and which suggests that excellence isn’t always about spending more on clinical care and less on operational activities; it’s about doing the right things more effectively.
Mark warned against the temptation to solve budget pressures through cutting corporate services, saying that non-patient-facing staffing costs in acute trusts have been static since 2018. He suggested there is “a real risk that the NHS could be somewhat undone by really going after corporate functions,” making the case for supporting corporate functions to enable change.
Why this matters now
As Erika Bannerman noted when discussing funding partnerships: “Capital funding is going to be essential for the 10-Year Plan to be realised.” The transformation requires strategic investment in corporate functions that enable, rather than hinder, clinical excellence.
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