VOT Health facilitate Learning Disabilities service improvement for Sheffield Health Partnership

The Trust sought a partner to work with its Specialist Community Learning Disabilities Service to facilitate service design clarity and improved efficacy and efficiency.   The service needed to complete its evolution, following co-location of teams and the historic closure of the LD inpatient service. 

VOT led an all-staff workshop, which followed a period of weeks engaging staff, observing process, and facilitating a comprehensive bottom-up exercise to capture how staff spent their time.  This revealed a huge opportunity to release time to care, and a consensus to do so.  Staff voted on the high impact ways of working that they would take forward.

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Task and finish groups have been established to take forward the changes at pace, drawing in essential support from corporate functions, such as ICT.

A key focus is reducing time spent on administration, which far exceeded direct care time.   The group explored different drivers, some of which are entirely within their hands, such as the need to rationalise meetings. 

Ensuring everyone across the service’s different professional groups established a shared electronic record of service user support status and pathway progression – and thus move away from local and often duplicate record keeping – was voted the #1 high impact change.