Rubicon has worked with numerous healthcare clients on a wide range of healthcare consultancy projects. A sample are shown below – please contact any of these organisations to find out what it is like to work with the Rubicon team.
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Berkshire Healthcare asked Rubicon to refresh the Trust’s five year strategy originally set out in their 2007 in light of the acquisition of two community providers. The brief was to undertake a market assessment followed by development of the newly merged Trust’s strategy. Rubicon produced the market assessment through a process of assessing demand and supply factors at a service level. Particular emphasis was placed on the overlap between mental and physical healthcare, including opportunities arising out of mental health support for people with long-term conditions. We then worked with executive directors to agree a strategy for the next three to five years starting with an assessment of whether or not the FT needed to grow to survive and concluding with an appraisal of growth opportunities. The refreshed strategy also covered work on service developments as well as the links to enabling strategies including workforce, estate and IM&T. The outcome was a refreshed strategy which sets out a clear direction of travel that the Trust will pursue for the next three to five years.
Staffordshire and Stoke NHS Partnership Trust
Staffordshire and Stoke is England’s largest community health provider. The Trust is pursuing a FT application and needed a market assessment to both assess risks and opportunities to its current community health service portfolio and to identify opportunities arising from its planned integration with Staffordshire adult social care. Rubicon produced a a divisional level market assessment, including a separate workstream for the yet to be acquired social care portfolio. A process of analysing demographic change, prevalence rates, local and national policy and commissioning intentions, was carried out to establish factors that would influence need and demand. This included liaison with the seven emerging CCGs as well as cluster commissioners. This demand assessment was then combined with an assessment of supply factors including existing and emerging competitors, to identify risks and opportunities to the new Trust. The product was a detailed divisional level assessment which identified risks and opportunities, and made a series of recommendations about how the Trust should response.
North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust
Rubicon has provided strategic advice to the Trust including work on the FT application; marketing, estate and IM&T strategies; annual business planning cycle; and service redesign initiatives. During 2011 we project managed a service redesign and public consultation concerning changes to adult and older people’s mental health services linked to the introduction of care clusters and the dementia strategy. The public consultation concluded successfully in November 2011. We are now working on a second series of service changes leading up to further public consultation in the spring of 2012.
Spire Healthcare
Spire Healthcare commissioned Rubicon to support thelaunch of a new joint venture targeting the private and corporate markets across the UK. Rubicon assisted Spire to identify the most promising geographical markets for a phased roll out of the new venture and to understand the competitive environment. Rubicon also helped write the initial three year plan for the new business.
Moorfields Private
Moorfields private is the private patient arm of Moorfields NHS Foundation Trust. Rubicon worked with Moorfields Private to assess opportunities to grow private ophthalmic activity across the south east by analysing Moorfield’s share of the private market by postcode. We then built a financial model to understand the relative profitability of each of the hospital’s key service lines. By combining our assessment of profitability with that of market share we were able to highlight those areas offering the greatest potential for growth.
Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust
When Southern Health merged community and mental health services into a single NHS Foundation Trust it needed a new estate strategy to reflect the new clinical model arising; opportunities for site rationalisation arising from the merger; the need to ensure that the whole estate is fit for purpose; and the need to make significant revenue savings over the next few years. Rubicon worked with Southern Health to agree a vision for the estate focused on delivery of the Trust’s objectives. This vision was turned into locality level implementation plans which will ensure that the Trust can reduce the number of buildings it uses by almost a third and in future deliver services from premises that are fit for modern healthcare delivery.
The Cardinal Clinic
The Cardinal Clinic is a private hospital in Windsor. The clinic asked Rubicon to provide support to market the hospital to potential referrals in support of a medium-term strategy to sell the hospital. Rubicon produced a marketing plan identifying new sources of referrals for the hospital and introduced the owners to potential buyers for the facility.
Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust
Rubicon is the Trust’s strategic estates advisers. We have worked with the Trust to write an outline business case for the development of a mental health inpatient centre of excellence which will see adult and older people’s beds centralised on one site in Leicester. Rubicon have also helped the Trust to produce an estate strategy focusing on meeting the needs of the new integrated clinical model and rationalising the existing owned and leased estate.
Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust
Working with colleagues from Fusion Health we produced a review of the estate owned and leased by this newly merged mental health and community health provider. Our work culminated in the identification of a number of estate rationalisation opportunities which could save £2m per annum for the Trust. We are currently working with the Trust to turn our earlier work into an estate strategy which will support the Trust’s Foundation Trust application.
Staffordshire Cluster of PCTs
The Staffordshire Cluster of PCTs wanted to understand why referrals into an autism assessment service were running at three times the contracted volume resulting in a contract dispute. Rubicon provided support focused on understanding the factors which may have accounted for the increased referral rate. We compared historic and current trends, and investigated changes to referral practice. The result of our investigation was a reconciliation of referrals and a series of recommendations linked to resolving the contract dispute.
A south of England community and mental health FT
Our client wanted a programme of work to; understand service risk and opportunity at service line level; create a methodology for measuring service line ‘value’; produce a detailed service line market assessment for core services; and to undertake an analysis of opportunities within the private patient market. The client also wanted skills transfer to their recently established business development team.
Working with clinicians, service managers, the Trust Board, corporate staff and colleagues from Consilium Consulting, Rubicon undertook a rolling programme of work starting by identifying which services where most at risk or had the greatest growth opportunities. The programme then focused on an appropriate marketing response for three core services; forensic psychiatry; children’s services; and integrated community service teams setting out risk mitigation and growth strategies for each. Rubicon also assessed opportunities for the FT to establish a private patients business in either community care; mental health or planned care. The final element of the work was to work with individual directors and non-executives to understand what constitutes ‘value’ to customers and the Trust, and to agree how the ‘value add’ of each service could be measured. The result was skills transfer to the FT’s business development team including a standard methodology for service line market assessments. The Trust Board were provided with an assessment of risks and opportunities by service line and with a strategic response for key services. Finally the client has an innovative methodology to assess value at a service level which will be used to assess new business opportunities and to identify services where the organisation needs to improve ‘value add’ or exit the market.
