Developing a stewardship and value programme for Mid and South Essex Health and Care Partnership

Mid and South Essex (MSE) Health and Care Partnership wanted to create a culture of stewardship for six key service areas and the populations they served. To support this ambition, Arden & GEM’s Healthcare Solutions team was commissioned to design and facilitate a bespoke four-month programme in partnership with Oxford Value and Stewardship.

Following a series of online learning and in-person workshops, stewardship teams now have the understanding to deliver truly integrated care within their system, with a clear framework outlining the data and perspectives needed for robust decision-making.

The challenge

MSE Health and Care Partnership wanted to better meet the care needs of their communities by creating a culture of stewardship. Stewardship groups were established within six key service areas with responsibility for coordinating across organisations and care sectors within MSE to consider the health needs of their population and determining an appropriate care offering. The six areas are:

• Ageing well
• Cardiac care
• Stroke care
• Urgent and emergency care
• Respiratory care
• Cancer care.

To support the six groups in their understanding of value and stewardship, MSE Health and Care Partnership commissioned a four-month customised development programme, to be designed and facilitated by Arden and GEM’s Healthcare Solutions team, working in partnership with the Oxford Value and Stewardship Programme.

Our approach

The Healthcare Solutions team brought the MSE programme leads together in weekly meetings to explore the maturity of the stewardship group’s development and available data to support their work, using this intelligence to design a bespoke stewardship and value programme.

The programme consisted of online learning and three half-day face to face workshops for each of the six stewardship groups. The in-person workshops were held at four-week intervals, to allow work and reflection to take place between sessions, on the key topics considered. The workshops were facilitated by Arden & GEM’s experienced leadership, change management and OD practitioners, with content delivered by value based healthcare evangelists, Sir Muir Gray and Dr Tim Wilson.

Workshop 1:
The focus of the first workshop was on what stewardship, the Triple Aim and the four purposes of an ICS meant for participants, both as a group and individually, as well as developing an understanding about the population segment, resource availability and dynamic with other population segment groups.

Workshop 2:
The second workshop took this thinking further by exploring how to operate, define success and make resource decision as a group and mapping out stakeholder networks.

Workshop 3:
The third and final workshop focused on what the group needed to do to refine the way improvement is measured and support a culture of stewardship.

“Very engaging.”

“The facilitator was very helpful and explained when there were gaps in understanding the task in hand.”

Outcomes

At the end of the three workshops, each of the six stewardship group presented a value framework that described:

• the aim and objectives of their group
• the scope of the group and a defined population
• defined resources for their group
• development of outcomes that will show that the group is meeting the Triple Aim duty of the Health and Care Act
• the metrics to be used to measure the outcomes of the group.

Stewardship teams now have the understanding to deliver truly integrated care within their system, with a clear framework outlining the data and perspectives needed for robust decision-making, including from health and care professionals (both clinical and non-clinical), and patients across all localities.

To continue supporting stewardship groups to achieve their aims, Arden & GEM’s business intelligence team is currently developing a monthly outcomes dashboard to demonstrate if groups are delivering against agreed personal, population and social measures.

The CSU has also been commissioned to continue work with the stroke stewardship group, exploring how they can better allocate resources to high value interventions using the STAR approach (Socio-Technical Allocation of Resources).