NEWS
CROSS-SECTOR PARTNERSHIP OFFERS BEST MODEL TO IMPROVE NHS SERVICES, SAY SENIOR HEALTHCARE LEADERS
S
enior NHS, private and third sector leaders have called for a dramatic rethink of healthcare contracting models, according to a new report.
The Power of Partnership – funded by Sodexo, the world’s largest services company, and informed by a reference panel made up of leaders from all three sectors – urges all three sectors to seize the potential of cross-sector partnership in improving quality of care for patients. The report finds that for complex, high spend and strategically important services, cross-sector partnerships offer great potential for innovative breakthroughs in productivity and quality; significantly more so than in more traditional outsourcing models. In a survey of over 280 industry leaders, only 1% of the NHS and 2% of private and third sector leaders believe there are no advantages to partnership working. The majority of both NHS (54%) and private/third sector (64%) feel the greatest potential for partnership lies in delivering clinical services. The group was spurred by the recent Department of Health and NHS England procurement review, Better Procurement, Better Value, better care, which focussed largely on the opportunity for savings in the procurement of goods. The reference panel felt the review missed a crucial opportunity to look at how to procure and contract for clinical and support services. The new report builds on the review by providing all sectors with advice on how to set up and deliver services through partnership models. A number of leading NHS organisations have contributed
detailed case studies to the report to show how cross-sector partnership works in practice. Camden and Islington NHS FT and Turning Point detail how they partnered in 2010 to deliver integrated drug and alcohol services in North London. The example highlights the importance of careful project management, open consultation and constant board engagement. Care UK and Sussex Partnership NHS FT show in the report how they co-operated to redesign mental health services by capitalising on a pre-existing relationship.
A third case study reveals how Taunton and Somerset NHS FT,
Yeovil District Hospital FT and Integrated Pathology Partnerships (iPP) established a joint venture (Southwest Pathology Services, SPS) to consolidate pathology services in Somerset. The case study explains the planning, procurement and governance arrangements for the joint venture. simon scrivens, managing Director at sodexo Health and Chairman of iPP notes: “This report is aimed at all parties, not just the NHS; the private sector must heed the advice too. It captures how we, the private sector, must start thinking. From my experience, there is a lot to learn about working with the public sector. Each party has strengths and weaknesses. You need to critically assess the capabilities of both parties and work out how these can fit together to deliver an outstanding service for the patient.” The report can be downloaded online from the Sodexo website:
http://uk.sodexo.com/uken/services/on-site/healthcare/ healthcare-partnerships/
power-partnership-report.aspx
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UNIQUE NEW MEASUREMENT SERVICE TO IMPROVE ANALYSIS OF
GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS
NPL and Astrium unveil new service to complement current ‘inventory approach’ models and validate national and international energy saving measures
The National Physical
Laboratory (NPL) is partnering with Astrium Services to deliver a new emissions measurement service to enable countries and cities to better quantify their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
This unique new service will provide actual measurements of carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide that will be fed into a sophisticated atmospheric model to provide highly accurate analysis that complements existing reporting methods.
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Emissions from a nation or a city are currently
calculated using the ‘inventory approach’. Through this activity, data – such as the number of miles driven by an average person – are multiplied by ‘emissions factors’ which turn that activity data into the tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. The new service will complement and improve these methods by using actual emissions measurements taken from the atmosphere and integrating them into the models used to produce a value for country or city-wide emissions. The measurements will be taken at permanent elevated sites round the country, from aircraft and eventually use satellite measurement of carbon dioxide too. These measurements will then be fed into the sophisticated model, to be merged with
Public sector sustainability • Volume 3 issue 9
inventories of natural and manmade GHG sources and sinks. This combination of actual measurement with traditional modelling will enable better validation of energy saving and decarbonising measures and determine if they are having the intended effect of reducing actual GHG emissions. NPL will produce the
highest-quality calibration gas standards to underpin the quality of the data used in the service. This is important as data quality is critical when looking for small changes over a number of years. As part of a pilot scheme for the new service, NPL, on behalf of Astrium, set up four sensors at elevated points across London to measure the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in the city’s air. The project combined these ground measurements from a
network of four sensors with airborne measurements and space-borne data collection. On top of that, The Astrium Bus, a converted London bus, which housed a mobile GHG sensor, was driven around a fixed London route every day to detect GHG concentrations at road level.
The bus combined the various measurements to produce a real-time cityscape video of carbon dioxide and methane concentrations around Central London. This produced 3D visualisations of modelled emission sources over London, the UK and the world, showing how natural sources and sinks of carbon dioxide compared with man- made emissions over a cycle of days and weeks. http://
event.astrium.eads.net/en- london-pilot/london-pilot-kzr/
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