SHAPE helps Norfolk & Waveney ICS plan for the future
Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care System (ICS) has a network of around 500 buildings spread across its system, including around 150 GP practices, three acute sites, eight community hospitals and numerous health centres, mental health clinics, pharmacies and dentists. These sites serve over one million people across a wide geographical area.
Craig Boyles, Estates Programme Manager at the ICS, is a long-time user of SHAPE, and has been using the new ICS Strategy Atlas to help with the ICS’s future planning for their estate.
Free to access for NHS staff, SHAPE is an online, interactive, data mapping, analysis and insight tool, supported by the Department of Health and Social Care, that supports service planning and estates strategy development.
Commissioned by NHS England, the recently launched ICS Strategy Atlas held within the SHAPE tool has formed a central estates database, ensuring that consistent data is applied at local, place, system and national level to support decision making. The features within the tool support scenario planning and drive efficiencies in the business case and strategy development processes.
“We’ve used the ICS Strategy Atlas to help with our estates infrastructure strategy, and it’ll be invaluable when it comes to the delivery plans,” Craig said. “Although we had a good handle on our estates data before, SHAPE has been a digital innovation for us. Previously we had data in lots of spreadsheets, but now it’s in an online platform accessible to more people, we can run reports, and our confidence in the data is really high.”
The ICS Strategy Atlas has both a data management area, which builds upon preloaded data from sources such as ERIC and the previous Primary Care Data Gathering Programme, and a data mapping and analysis area, which overlays and visualises the data within maps, charts and graphs.
Craig’s team has used SHAPE to map the entire ICS estate, helping populate the ‘where are we now?’ section of the infrastructure strategy. They have also found the housing growth information really useful, forecasting proposed population growth, and its subsequent effect on demand for health services.
“Once we come to our delivery plans, I’ll be using the ICS Strategy Atlas within SHAPE nearly every day,” Craig said. “Our infrastructure strategy is a 10 year plan, but it’ll be a live document that we’re updating regularly, alongside a number of individual project delivery plans – it won’t just sit on a shelf for a decade!”
Craig finds that SHAPE gives him a good ‘big picture’ understanding of the estate as a whole. It allows his team to look at where underutilised estate is located near other properties, showing ways in which efficiencies and consolidation of services can be made, in turn reducing the amount the ICS has to spend on its estate.
SHAPE’s ability to map travel times is also helpful when looking at consolidating sites or disinvesting in tail estate. You can track access to alternative sites via walking, cycling, car and public transport, to understand the impact of any prospective changes, ensuring service users aren’t negatively affected by plans designed to make estates more efficient.
Norfolk and Waveney ICS is also using SHAPE for scenario planning to help inform their strategy to increase the role of their community sites, helping track utilisation of current community sites in readiness for the shift from acute to community and primary care.
The next step for the estates team is to raise awareness of the benefits of SHAPE across the wider ICS. “We’re already using SHAPE across our estates department, but our clinical transformation teams are also interested in using it now, so we’ll be doing some training with them soon,” Craig said. “There are some really interesting ways in which SHAPE could be used to help with clinical strategies, so that’s an exciting step for us.”
To obtain access to your own ICS information, to arrange a demonstration of the tool or to get more information contact help@shapeatlas.net
