Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership

GMHSCP underwent a significant period of change, along with a 20% reduction in their staff back office staffing budget driven by national policy. This required its teams to adapt to meet demanding and challenging circumstances, resulting in an urgent need to examine the current working methods and model and to understand where new ways of working could be adopted. The primary driver was to increase cross-team working and to create greater resilience.

Biomatics were approached by the GMHSP via the Unity Partnership to:

• Provide a baseline and understanding of current processes and ways of working
• Create clarity on the must do’s and the nice to haves
• Inform the development of a cross functional, future proof operating model which could align to the new structure

Working with the Unity Partnership, Biomatics conducted a review of existing processes within the GMHSCP’s existing service operating model to determine where substantive improvement work could be achieved, through applying lean process redesign techniques and reallocating existing working patterns. The fundamental driver for this work was to ensure that Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership are able to deliver its services even more efficiently and to remove or mitigate any areas of risk or single points of failure.

Our Advanced Lean Practitioner and Project Manager worked alongside Unity Partnership to undertake a thorough Lean process review. By working closely with 30+ GMHSCP stakeholders we were able to understand the strengths of the current ways of operating, and also the opportunities for capacity release and how teams could work in a cross functional way.

Biomatics’ Lean review approach required the client and consultants to work closely for the duration of the work.

Unity Partnership and Biomatics collaboratively took GMHSCP on the first steps of a transformational journey, identifying pain points and appropriate solutions. Unity’s trusted engagement at a senior management level provided an appropriate level of assurance to GMHSP, while Biomatics were able to focus on operational issues and solutions.

Biomatics and Unity were able to present GMHSCP with a solution together with an implementation approach, which included a number of delivery options; the outcome of which allows GMHSCP to have the right people in the right place to deliver the best services for colleagues, localities and the population.

This project explored and designed how GMHSCP could move to a matrix operating model which share skills and knowledge and migrate to more structured pipelines of work and utilises project teams wrapped around organisations priorities tied into performance management.