The modern healthcare environment, or shall we say health economy, gives rise to considerable opportunities and significant threats depending on your state of readiness and with the forthcoming financial famine in health, the heat is already being turned up. Despite this, many Trusts still find themselves with a change resistant, internally competitive, clinical workforce who are ill-prepared for the environment they will rapidly find themselves in. Enter Clinical Business Excellence – the sensible and effective approach to smartening up.
Time is of the essence and services that slowly build competency over a number of years may find themselves seriously on the back foot. Somehow, they need to rapidly gain that competency concurrently with strong strategic development. A typical Clinical Business Excellence programme is designed to do just that through a carefully constructed combination of development and facilitated support. Each situation is unique but may include the following elements:
We’ll happily discuss your circumstances and advise a programme accordingly. What you can be sure of is that the programme will produce the goods. We don’t do ‘tick box’.
In a nutshell, take your clinical workforce, no matter how resistant they are, and bring them to a fighting fit state of readiness in short order. However, this isn’t just development. Our success is really measured in yours and so you’ll find us committed to assisting your teams be successful in an extremely challenging environment.
We are so certain of our impact that we guarantee what we do. After we have agreed a programme of development and support, you can withdraw at any stage claiming a full refund (excludes operational expenses such as venue & catering, if used) for the stage immediately prior. This gives you true peace of mind that you aren’t wasting valuable budget, as well as confidence that we know what we are doing.
Each programme is constructed after careful discussion and diagnosis of your situation. Each potential area of focus below can stand alone or be built into a development programme.
Area of focus |
What and why? |
Insights – Understanding the Evolving Healthcare Landscape
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The starting point for most programmes is in developing a true understanding of the environment in which clinical teams operate. This includes everything from population dynamics to financial re-configuration and funding. On completion, you’ll find teams are change-ready and willing to collaborate. This programme can be delivered in small groups, larger numbers, by e-learning and other configurations, depending on requirements. |
Core Skills in Strategic Business Excellence for Service Leaders |
Typically a two-day meeting room based course designed to equip service leads with both the strategic mindset and the methodology to lead their services to success in the modern environment. The highly interactive and practical nature of the course best lends itself to the facilitated workshop format with relatively limited numbers on each. |
Creating Clinical Excellence in the Context of Modern Healthcare |
A practical workshop designed to embed the importance of clinical excellence, along with the risks arising if it is not made a priority. However, this workshop places clinical excellence in the context of our business environment, ensuring a sensible balance between outcome, experience and effort, whilst ensuring that services continually address clinical performance and improvement. Importantly, this workshop will foster greater collaboration between clinical teams and Trust by demonstrating that the Trust wishes to address all aspects of performance, not just financial. |
Core Skills in Marketing, PR & Referral Management for Clinical Services
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The lifeblood of service success is in a continual flow of ‘profitable’ patients, attached to whom is income. Many services do not appreciate the change in how patients flow, coupled to the increasing incentives being used to lure them from secondary care. This programme installs a marketing mindset, develops core skills in the marketing & PR process and helps services develop an effective strategy for business maximisation. |
Mastering Business Development, Partnership Working & Tendering
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The whole business development process is alien to clinical teams and yet vital in the increasingly tender-driven marketplace. The process adds essential business skills whilst helping participants consider out-of-box solutions to being competitive against possibly better funded and more nimble third sector providers. |
Core Skills in Creating Excellence in Patient Experience
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Patient experience is an increasingly prominent component of performance management and a future performance indicator likely to affect funding. Designed to cover ‘customer’ excellence, assessment of experience and differentiation from competing services, this programme drives experience improvement from the ground up, resulting in valued services and a more robust platform from which to compete. |
Core Skills in Finance & Business Planning for Consultants & Clinical Leaders
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Fundamental to service success is mindful attention to how finance works in the modern economy. Designed to rapidly deliver insight in a format that is easily understood, this programme encourages solid financial management at a service level, as well as continually attention to factors affecting finance. Finance becomes a strategic issue of the utmost importance, despite the unpalatable nature of all things financial in the clinical environment. |
Optimising Cost Improvement Programmes at a Service Level
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The impending financial famine dictates that cost improvement becomes an everyday part of strategic service management. However, the average service addresses cost improvement in an episodic manner with little coalface commitment to continual cost management. This programme specifically addresses the mindset necessary to get whole-team commitment to cost improvement, as well as driving up competency in how to go about it without losing clinical quality or productivity. |
Advanced Influencing, Negotiation & Engagement Skills
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Success in any area requires engagement and influencing of the clinical workforce. This programme acts as an enabler to all other programmes, helping leaders drive transformation with their teams rather than in spite of them. It’s a vital component of people effectiveness. |
The above components represent the core areas forming the Clinical Business Excellence Centre of Excellence. However, Trusts may well find they additionally need to consider both leadership & management development too, as well as addressing such factors as time management & personal effectiveness, clinical governance, appraisals and other performance-related issues.
As the name suggests, a Centre of Excellence marks an area of healthcare performance where we hold particular expertise and in which we can offer exceptional benefit. In Centres of Excellence we concentrate not only on producing products or services but also in thought leadership through research and insight generation. This depth of insight ensures we produce the very best of returns for you whilst giving you the confidence that you are appointing a supporting partner in their area of true competency.
Clinical Business Excellence is an area in which we have become renowned due to our deep understanding of the evolving healthcare landscape, coupled with what it takes to excel. However, successful development involves more than just insight, important though that is. Probably the greatest challenge facing Trusts is in how to get their clinical workforce to engage in business or non-clinical issues at all. Medicology, with a largely clinical heritage, has been extremely successful in achieving this Holy Grail of healthcare development.
We’d be delighted to discuss your particular needs and circumstances directly. In the first instance, contact Andrew Vincent, Managing Director and Head of Clinical Business Excellence, on or 01332 821260