National award win for innovative work around patient data

December 9, 2019

Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust’s innovative work to understand the impact and value of healthcare costing on patient care has won them a prestigious national award.

Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust (GHC) was awarded the Costing Award at the National Healthcare Management Finance Awards (HFMA) in central London. The prestigious annual awards celebrate excellence in financial departments across the NHS.  GHC was chosen to receive the accolade from a strong shortlist from across the UK.

The award recognised GHC’s groundbreaking work in combining business intelligence and patient costing data to help clinicians improve services. The work has involved numerous teams within the Trust, including frontline clinical colleagues, costing and finance, and IT. Together, they have worked to analyse the data that the Trust gathers, and look at how it can be applied to delivering better care for patients, through understanding a patient’s journey through services, and how they move between different services the Trust offers. This will enable teams to take proactive measures and adapt treatment to try to prevent regular readmission to services, or a patient having contact with numerous different teams at different times.

This has seen the Trust become one of only four trusts in the country to earn EVO Bronze accreditation from the Healthcare Costing for Value Institute. The EVO evaluation team described GHC as the leader in this field among England’s mental health, community health and combined mental and community health trusts.

Iain Cockley-Adams, Deputy Director of Adult Community Services, GHC, said: “We are very proud to have been given this award. Simply being on the shortlist was a fantastic achievement and winning the award is a real recognition of the national significance of our work to advance the development and use of patient-level costing in the community sector. We will now be building upon this work across the Trust, continuing to put our patients and service users at the heart of all we do.”

Jenny Richards, Senior Planning and Costing Manager, GHC, said: “This award is the result of a huge amount of work, not just from the Costing Team, but also from operational and clinical teams, and the dedication and commitment of our frontline staff, who can clearly see that the data we are producing is key to better patient care, better patient outcomes and better value for money. It’s also a result of our inquisitive approach with the data, with crucial support from our Director of Finance, Sandra Betney.”

The judging criteria for the Costings Award were:

  • A measurable improvement in the quality of costing processes and costing data
  • Recognition of the importance of costing within the organisation
  • The effect the improvement has had on the wider organisation and on the patient / service user experience
  • The level of partnership between finance and non-finance staff in the development of robust costing information.

A total of eight awards were given, ranging from the Innovation Award to the Finance Director of the Year Award.

HFMA outgoing president and chief finance officer at Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust, Bill Gregory, said: ‘We were pleased to receive a very high-calibre of entries for the National Healthcare Finance Awards. NHS staff across the country are working extremely hard to innovate, lead by example, and ensure good quality healthcare. It is important to celebrate their commitment and the dedication of sector leaders. Huge congratulations to Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust for this well-deserved achievement, which once again highlights the strength of our NHS staff.’

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