Our work to model the impact of the changes and the centralisation of services onto fewer hospital sites will help to tackle inequalities and improve patient outcomes for nearly 3M people.
Opportunity
More than 300 lives a year are estimated to be lost as a consequence of variations in clinical practice and healthcare provision across Greater Manchester. The National Health Service (NHS) needed to make better use of its resources to reduce long-term illness and premature death and embarked on the largest single reconfiguration programme of hospital services in the UK to date. Under an initiative called Healthier Together, the NHS has redesigned how primary and community care, and general surgery, acute medicine and A&E services will be provided in the future. It’s a radical transformation and forms an important part of the devolution of health and social care.
Healthier Together, UK
Solution
We undertook detailed activity and financial modelling of the current care provision across 10 local hospitals, initially working with these hospitals and local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to forecast future growth in services and examine the feasibility of delivering more care in the community. As the programme progressed, we modelled the changes in patient flow, income and costs of over 40 options that would result from centralising emergency and acute hospital services onto fewer sites. We then conducted an assessment to evaluate the positive and negative impacts on residents for each option. Our consultants, often responding at short notice to evolving clinical requirements, provided robust analysis in support of decisions critical to the success of the programme.
Outcome
In July 2015, the CCGs unanimously agreed to centralise services onto four hospital sites. The ultimate benefits will be reduced in-hospital mortality rates and inequalities in healthcare, more residents treated in their local community instead of hospitals, seven-day access to primary care services and reduced waiting times in A&E, adding up to improved health and wellbeing for 2.8M residents.