Cost Improvements

Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest Mental Health Trusts in the North West of England. The Trust sought to develop and implement a cost improvement programme and engaged In-Form Solutions to support them in this and with their financial planning framework.

In-Form Solutions initially reviewed the current cost improvement programme and assessed the likelihood of delivering that plan. This was successfully completed by liaising with the finance team and the respective managers and directors for each scheme, scrutinising its progress and examining the risk of each outcome. In-Form Solutions identified several new opportunities, which were discussed and reviewed by the Trust team and then actioned. During this review, we designed a new set of templates and monitoring tools, quality impact assessment processes and delivery plans to enable the Trust to assess and report progress continually.

To ensure that the programme, together with the individual schemes, were realistic and deliverable, In-Form Solutions engaged managers and clinicians through one-to-one meetings, hosting formal steering group meetings and workshops.

In-Form Solutions reported to the Director of Operations, together with the lead Executive Director of each Clinical Directorate, to facilitate engagement, and we worked closely with the finance team to coordinate the financial planning framework.

The outputs of our work included:

• An assessment of the Cost Improvement Programme.
• Design and delivery of new Cost Improvement templates.
• Cost Improvement Risk Assessment and Quality Impact Assessment tools.
• Identification of new cost improvement opportunities.
• In conjunction with the Trust teams, the production of detailed delivery and action plans.

The key outcome of our work was to facilitate the successful implementation of our programme, with the assessment findings and additions incorporated, alongside new processes to support it.