Herefordshire and Worcestershire Integrated Care System

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 on a shared vision: Working together to enable better health, fulfilment, and safety in our residents’ lives. The Herefordshire and Worcestershire Integrated Care System (ICS) is a partnership of all parts of the NHS working together with councils and other partners including 3 NHS Trusts, 8 Local Authorities, 15 Primary Care Networks (PCNs), 79 GP Practices, 123 Community Pharmacies, 96 Dentists and 64 Optometrists.

What Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICS wanted to achieve

To achieve their aims, the Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICS are delivering several 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 ICS 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 Verto and Hereford and Worcestershire ICS 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 ICS 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 ICS achieve their goals

Their PMO is currently working alongside Verto on the reports to share and pull programme information together across the organisations in the ICS footprint to facilitate a click of a button reporting, saving several day’s worth of effort.

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

With the flexibility of the system, developing our local instances in partnership with Verto 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, Programme Manager – Herefordshire and Worcestershire

The benefits Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICS are seeing

Šorena Maguire, Programme Officer, uses Verto for management of the ICS programmes and the executive support has helped to achieve full organisational buy-in. Many of the organisations that form part of the overall ICS, delivered briefings to 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 ICS, many of their organisations were also using Excel 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 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 ICS uses Verto to deliver and track their financial recovery programmes and is developing automated reports for the Financial Recovery Board.

Verto is continuing its work with Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICS. Together we are developing an executive dashboard and intend to make reporting, required by the ICS and the regulator, less labour-intensive, more standardised and streamlined with the most up-to-date, relevant information.