When NHS South Warwickshire CCG needed support to deliver its plans under the Winter Access Fund allocation, Arden & GEM was tasked with providing project management expertise.
In addition to completing all necessary project documentation and liaising with scheme leads, the Arden & GEM team also captured project progress, outcomes and learning to report back to NHS England and support the CCG in deploying future schemes more efficiently and effectively.
The challenge
The Winter Access Fund for 2021/22 was made available to health and care systems from November 2021 to March 2022 to build resilience within and improve patient access to primary care services. With the funding announced in October 2021, systems had a very short time period to plan and develop projects for funding. This required implementation plans to be turned around quickly and the schemes to be rolled out at pace.
NHS South Warwickshire CCG (now NHS Coventry and Warwickshire ICB) approached Arden & GEM’s Healthcare Solution team to provide project management support for each scheme identified and accepted for funding.
Our approach
With expertise and experience in managing healthcare projects and established relationships with stakeholders in South Warwickshire, the Healthcare Solutions team quickly set about identifying the roles and responsibilities within the programme of work and establishing the key reporting milestones.
The team arranged meetings with the key stakeholders to understand more fully the schemes that were being introduced in order to produce the necessary project documentation.
For each scheme, a Project Initiation Document (PID) was created in collaboration with the scheme leads. This set out the project objectives, scope, governance and was used as a way of monitoring ongoing progress.
As the funding came to an end, the team was responsible for reporting on the outcomes achieved. This included:
- Creating a suite of case studies to describe the funded projects, their deployment, outcomes and KPIs to be presented back to NHS England
- Writing a series of business cases outlining the work undertaken and results, to inform the CCG and be used as a reference for future funding applications
- Producing a lessons learned log, designed to enable a faster rollout of schemes in future funding rounds and maximise return on investment.
The outcomes
In addition to rapid and robust project management support to deploy Winter Access Fund schemes in 2021/22, the commissioner has also benefited from a suite of documents that can be used to quickly mobilise and deliver future initiatives. Key learning and reporting mechanisms have been captured to ensure a clarity in approach and focus on maximising outcomes from the outset of all new schemes.