Across Herefordshire and Worcestershire, health and care organisations are committed to always providing safe and effective services, however the way some services are run may need to change. This is because they have a growing population and rising demands on services, and they must make sure they can do the best they can with the resources available.

Due to the size of the challenge, health and social care bodies in Herefordshire and Worcestershire (and across the country) are working together to help make sure the NHS is safe and sustainable for the future. This is called the Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) which is essentially implementing the NHS’ Five Year Forward View.

The Herefordshire and Worcestershire STP comprises of several footprint organisations, Worcestershire County and Herefordshire Councils, NHS Redditch and Bromsgrove, NHS South Worcestershire, NHS Wyre Forest and NHS Herefordshire CCGs, Worcestershire Acute Hospitals, Worcestershire Health and Care, Wye Valley, 2gether Foundation NHS Trusts, 4 Primary Care Collaborations in Worcestershire (covering 64 practices) and the Taurus GP Federation in Herefordshire (representing 24 practices).

What Herefordshire and Worcestershire STP wanted to achieve

To achieve their aims, the Herefordshire and Worcestershire STP are delivering a number of transformational programmes of work across several priority change areas. These programmes require project teams from each member organisation to work together at local and regional level, sharing information and reporting on progress to their Boards and Committees as well as the NHS England. To achieve this, they needed a Cloud based programme and project management system which everyone could access to share information to enable collaborative working, and which could also support mobile and agile working.

The STP also recognised that trying to manage their programmes on spreadsheets and word documents was a very manual and time-consuming process, that made visibility of an up to date, single version of the truth extremely difficult to achieve. File sharing tools could not support their requirements, so a new collaboration platform was needed to allow local projects to be managed and reported on by member organisations as well as project teams to jointly work on shared projects and programmes.

As the Verto system was already widely used across other NHS and Local government organisations, a development partnership was set up between TMI Systems and H&W STP to create a regional solution which could support this new way of working.

Collation of the information across these programmes for reporting purposes took several days. The STP required a way to record real-time information and ultimately generate click of a button reporting.

They wanted to be able to accurately track the progress of each project and programme of work to ensure improvement in services for their population were delivered in a sustainable cost-effective way.

How Verto are helping Herefordshire and Worcestershire STP achieve their goals

The H&W STP PMO and TMI are currently working on the reports to share and pull programme information together across the organisations in the STP footprint to facilitate a click of a button reporting, saving several days effort.

• The flexibility of Verto means that the STP can create a work flow and subsequent programme reporting that meets their specific needs.
• All the organisations within the STP can be connected to Verto via a shared view called Verto^grid.
• In addition, these organisations can also use Verto for their local programme management.

With the flexibility of the Verto system, developing our local instances in partnership with TMI has enabled the development of a virtual team across organisations within our Health and Care System. This is key for the future in terms of integrated working and system development.

Ali Roberts, STP Programme Manager – Herefordshire and Worcestershire

The benefits Herefordshire and Worcestershire STP are seeing

Šorena Maguire, Programme Officer, uses Verto for management of the STP programmes as well as those of three Worcestershire CCGs.

The Executive support of Verto at the CCGs helped to achieve full organisational buy in. The CCGs delivered briefings to all staff which were led by the Executive teams and the Programme Management Office to ensure everyone knew why the new approach to programme management was changing.

As with the STP, NHS Redditch and Bromsgrove, NHS South Worcestershire and NHS Wyre Forest CCGs were also using spreadsheets and word documents to manage their projects and faced the same challenges, so they too chose to streamline their processes and work to achieve standardised reporting via project Highlight reports produced on Verto.

The greatest benefits of Verto are the ability to share, view and edit programme information without fear of losing anything, instead of multiple spreadsheets and word documents, there is a single view of information that is entered in the system and saved automatically.

The TMI staff are always quick and helpful when responding to queries, which is refreshingly different – there is no automated queuing!

Šorena Maguire, Programme Officer, Programme Management Office – NHS Redditch and Bromsgrove, NHS South Worcestershire and NHS Wyre Forest CCGs

The CCG uses Verto to deliver and track their financial recovery programmes and are developing automated reports for the CCG Financial Recovery Board.

TMI continue to work with Herefordshire and Worcestershire STP, together we are developing an executive dashboard and intend to make reporting required by the STP and the regulator less labour intensive, standardised with the most up to date, relevant information.