Planning for East Sussex’s New Hospital Programme, UK
The Strategic Outline Case optimises services across major sites and tackles a significant maintenance backlog to reshape future services. This project has demonstrated the importance of a high performing Emergency front door, resulting in significant downstream impacts on flow and service demand.
Who is the client?
East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust provides NHS hospital and community services throughout East Sussex.
New Hospital Programme opportunity
With a large backlog of maintenance and improvement projects, the Trust were allocated significant financial support as part of the UK Government’s New Hospital Programme (formerly the Healthcare Infrastructure Plan). This represents a once in a generation opportunity to deliver radically improved facilities for the local population and innovative pathways in line with the aspirations of the local Integrated Care System.
The Trust were set an expedited timeline set by NHS central management to plan out future healthcare needs and deliver the draft Strategic Outline Case in 16 weeks. They required evidence-based healthcare planning to optimise the full range of hospital and community services provided across Eastbourne Hospital, Conquest Hospital and Bexhill Community Hospital.
What did we do?
Our team of healthcare planners responded rapidly, identifying priority planning activities to meet the challenging HIP programme timescales.
We led healthcare planning, including population health analysis, demographic modelling, demand and capacity assessment, clinical model development, operational design brief and functional content development. This covered a wide range of services including emergency pathways, inpatients, theatres, diagnostics, endoscopy, outpatients, community rehabilitation, paediatric and maternity services.
We focused on optimising the critical area of Emergency Floor; prioritising streamlined pathways and managing unscheduled care demand more effectively. The team applied comprehensive understanding of key elements of a high performing front door, based on learning from national models of care development and their combined significant operational experience of healthcare delivery in the acute sector.
Working collaboratively with partners to minimise risk within the critical path for the programme, we helped the Trust to prioritise key clinical and operational engagement activities to develop the necessary vision, pathway and design information.
Recognising the significant pressures on clinical teams, whilst acknowledging the scale of opportunity to make improvements, we minimised the time commitment of front line staff by enabling them to focus on the decisions within the scheme that are most important to the delivery of excellent patient care.
What was the outcome?
The Strategic Outline Case was delivered within the challenging timeline, with Archus playing a key part through prioritising modelling and development of service lines with the greatest material impact on the scheme design.
We worked closely with clinical stakeholders to address the significant inpatient capacity risks posed by forecast demographic growth. We’ve also showed sensitivity to access challenges posed by the wider patient catchment, to meet the needs of those living in more remote areas.
By responding with pace, enthusiasm and critical precision, we have focused on facilitating consensus and delivering within the time pressures of the process, whilst also contributing significant learning regarding the downstream impacts on flow/service demand, resulting from changes in front door demand.
