West London Trust (WLT) had invested heavily in expanding its community mental health services but recognised it needed help to transform service efficacy and efficiency.

With guidance from members of the VOT team this was implemented in 3 distinct phases:

1. The vision was ‘easy in, easy out’ for service users, yet the status quo was far from this – staff needed to understand the status quo needed to change and buy into that change
2. Identification of high impact operating model changes via ‘triangulation’ of data analytics, staff interviews, & process walk through
3. High impact changes required fundamental practice changes with Lean change facilitation. New processes needed to be codified and tested in a controlled manner for adoption across 9 different community teams.

This was done as ‘one-team’ with client staff. Working especially closely with the Clinical Director and frontline leads, with a focus on provision of analytical and Lean process redesign rigours. We were able to collectively achieve:

• An 80% reduction in no. of days waiting for a first attended contact, for a list of over 3,000 SUs waiting for first contact;
• The rate of on-caseload crisis presenters was reduced by 10%, which significantly reduced pressures on A&Es and beds;
• A 99% reduction in long standing cases with no contact was delivered.

The trust continues to see improved outcomes, and utilises improvement methodology and ‘easy in/easy out’ decision support visibility our team introduced during the project.

The clinical director attached to the program concluded “we could not have achieved this transformation without [us]” and was “really impressed with the pace at which you have got everyone on board and engaged in this work”.