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How to engage individuals and teams in World Class Commissioning

As Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) prepare for the second round of World Class Commissioning (WCC) panels this spring, ODS Joint Managing Director Carol Brooks provides some timely advice.

The following is an adapted extract from Carol’s article in Health Service Journal (21 January 2010).

Background

World Class Commissioning (WCC) is a major NHS initiative designed to encourage Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) to adopt more strategic ways of commissioning healthcare services – ultimately, delivering better care for the local population.

Like any major initiative, WCC will only succeed if it is understood and adopted by everyone involved in the process, at all levels of the organisation.

Working in partnership with the Northern Network of Teaching PCTs, ODS developed a new tool to help PCTs prepare for the WCC challenge.

The ODS Commissioning Qualities Tool (CQT) involves:

Individuals completing an online questionnaire that matches their own roles and skills to the 11 WCC competencies
Analysis of the resulting data to provide a comprehensive picture of the organisation’s performance at individual, team and organisational level
Facilitated discussion and feedback sessions to consider the key findings and produce ongoing action plans to deliver improvements.

The tool was used successfully by Liverpool PCT – currently one of the top 12 PCTs for world class commissioning – and we are now using the process with Dudley PCT.

These are some of the main lessons that have emerged from our experience to date:

1. Detail matters: PCTs are bombarded with data, but much of this is ‘big picture’ rather than grass roots detail. For any assurance process to succeed, it is mportant to have a detailed understanding of what is happening at individual and team level, as influencing this behaviour is the only way to deliver organisational change.

2. Make it relevant: A common problem with new NHS initiatives is that their perceived complexity means individuals can’t easily relate them to their own role. Helping people to understand what a new system means for them enables them to contribute to change. The ODS Commissioning Qualities Tool does this by breaking down each of the WCC competencies into distinct actions or behaviours that relate to an individual’s role.

3. Don’t just analyse, talk: hard data matters, but spreadsheets and graphs alone will never deliver change. Externally-facilitated discussion – a key step in the ODS CQT process – is vital, in order to consider the implications of the data and to plan specific actions to be taken.

4. Get buy-in from the top: Ownership at a senior level is a vital factor in delivering any change. Individuals and teams need to know that management is committed to seeing the process through

5. Spell out the benefits to all involved. If individuals, teams and managers know what’s in it for them, you will get a better response

If you are Health Service Journal subscriber, click here to read the full text of Carol’s article.

Click here to find out more about Liverpool PCT’s successful use of the CQT

If you would like to know more about how the CQT can help your organisation achieve change and make an impact

Please contact Carol Brooks at carol@odsuk.com

ODS are pleased to share with you, the article, Scrutinizing local public service provision published in Public Money and Management, September 2009. The article was co-written by Donna Bradshaw, joint managing director here at ODS along with former colleagues from the Manchester Business School and the University of Manchester

To download a full printable version of the article please click here

Organisation Development Services Ltd, in 2009, was commissioned by 5050vision on behalf of the North West partnership, to facilitate the creation of Everybody's future: a framework for ageing in the North West. Su Fowler- Johnson, project lead and Senior consultant here at ODS is pleased to share this framework with you.

Please click here to download a full printable version of the framework