GUIDANCE
KNOWLEDGE
TRANSFORMATION
NHS TRUST BENCHMARKING
East Suffolk and North Essex Trust provides healthcare services to around 370,000 people. In addition, the Trust provides radiotherapy and oncology services to a wider population of about 670,000 people across north and mid-Essex. The Trust’s £25m state-of-the-art radiotherapy centre at Colchester General Hospital became operational in June 2014.
Following an earlier review of its Corporate Services, the Trust was keen to explore the possibilities for cost improvement with regard to a number of its Clinical services, as part of a wider programme to balance the Trust’s books. Consequently, the Trust sought some independent benchmarking analysis that would help to inform the Trust as to how its services compared with those of other similar organisations from a financial perspective.
The benchmarking exercise was conducted by GK Transformation and our report presented the outcome of the benchmarking analysis together with an assessment of the existing CIP plans and some additional suggestions. The review encompassed the Trust’s Top 10 overspending clinical service areas and specifically included:
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Care of the Elderly/General Medicine
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Emergency Med
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Oncology
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General Surgery
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Trauma & Orthopaedic
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Maternity
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Urology
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Stroke Medicine
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Dermatology
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A&E
OUR APPROACH
This review sought to compare the costs of the Trust’s Top 10 overspending areas with those of other NHS Trusts.
GKT undertook a focused cost comparison exercise, using comparative data from:
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130 Trust wide reviews (Financial Recovery Plans)
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865 Service Reviews
Validation: Through semi-structured interviews with the key service managers of those services that formed the scope of this review we gained a good understanding of the services being provided.
Comparative Analysis: Having established a suitable understanding of the service provision at the Trust, the levels of service being provided, the costs and quality of these services, our team then undertook comparisons of this performance with that of other Trusts. Details of the comparator Trusts used were provided to the client Trust.
Report: Finally our Consultant Team presented the findings of the review within a 150 page report, having been thoroughly validated as part of our ISO9001 accredited quality assurance system.
OUTCOMES
The benchmarking suggested that if the Trust’s costs could be reduced to that of the average, a potential saving of 8.7% would be achieved. However, it should be noted that amongst these potential savings were Overhead costs, which were already being addressed through the Corporate Services review.
Excluding the areas where the Overhead costs appear above average, the potential for cost saving within these Top 10 areas was in the region of 6%.