Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP)
Helping an NHS Mental Health Trust develop and launch a new five-year strategy
Challenge
The recent creation of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), and the ongoing challenges in the UK health sector, pose huge challenges to Trusts such as AWP who serve multiple ICBs during these times of changing needs
Outcome
A set of coherent strategy documents to help align the organisation around a new vision and facilitate stakeholder engagement
In recent years the UK’s health sector has been beset by a number of huge challenges - regular structural changes, funding pressures, an ageing population, digital transformation opportunities, staffing difficulties, rising demand for critical services, and then Covid…
AWP provides crucial mental health services across a huge - and varied - geographic area to a population of c.1.9million people, working in partnership with two ICBs and six local authorities. This complex operating landscape provides unique challenges as the Trust seeks to deliver the needs of its many stakeholders whilst continuing to look after its staff and continue on its digital transformation journey.
During 2022 we have been working closely with AWP’s leadership team, initially to develop and refine the overarching organisational strategy into a coherent and simple vision that could be communicated to staff and stakeholders. Subsequently, we supported AWP’s digital team to develop a digital strategy aligned to that vision, and explore opportunities to develop their use of electronic patient records (EPR) systems to enhance system interoperability and data analysis.
“Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP) have recently launched a new five year strategy that outlines how the organisation will become “outstanding AWP”. The team at Emergent were pivotal to the delivery of this strategy, instrumental in the design and concept stages, constantly offering advice and guidance on how to simplify and ensure that the final document resonated with service users, staff and system partners. Nothing was ever too much for Matt and his team. Weekly calls were always structured, clear and worthwhile. This is the first Strategy AWP has had approved by Board for a very long time, this wouldn’t have been possible without the support from Emergent. Such was the success of the final output that they have been retained for other strategies also in development, a current piece of work is focusing on a new digital strategy for the trust. Having Emergent lead this strategy work also allowed me to continue building my team and to construct a transformation plan that will deliver and execute this strategy.”
“Emergent provided consultancy support to AWP in order to produce the Digital Strategy document and also to undertake an options appraisal regarding the future MH EPR direction of travel. I’ve found them to be both professional and adaptable in their approach and in both scenarios enabled a successful outcome to be achieved.
They were understanding throughout the process regarding the complex nature of the digital and political environment and took into account organisational, regional and national considerations while undertaking the work. More than anything, they have the skills to deliver a quality end product that has transformed initial vision/ideas into clear strategic outputs that are understandable to a wide audience.”