Support for place-based commissioning in Wirral

 

The final installment of case studies focusing on Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council takes a closer look at how Local Insight has supported place-based commissioning across the Borough.

The previous case studies have covered the efficiency saving elements as well as the opportunities for sharing information across the organisation. The work Wirral have carried out on place-based care localities combines the two to demonstrate real world applications of Local Insight.

The flexibility to create and edit areas easily, as well as an interactive platform on which to share data allowed the Wirral Intelligence Service and the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to define the geographic boundaries for the place-based commissioning localities.

Context

Place-based commissioning is driven by CCGs and is a different way of thinking about delivering services. Previously, public health commissioning had been based on providers, for example, looking at a population based upon the users of a hospital of a GP practice. Now Wirral are looking at this in a more geographically focused way. This allows the Council and CCGs to better allocate resources based upon the needs of the local people – rather than simply what funds a particular hospital has to spend.

The Wirral Intelligence Service were tasked with creating some custom geographies for the Wirral, based on place-based commissioning models.

Robbie Minshall (Public Health Commissioning Analyst) explains; “The model is called 51-9-4-1 . The idea being there are 51 practices in 9 neighbourhoods under 4 localities and 1 Wirral. We were asked to create these 4 localities using LSOAs with a population of about 90,000 in each locality. So using Local Insight we gathered all the population level data. And then tried to devise boundaries to make them of comparable size in terms of population and geographic area. They also needed to have a fairly equal number of GP practices, which Local Insight was helpful for as you can plot the locations on the map.”

The process

Understandably, the process went through a number of iterations before deciding on the final geographies. The Wirral Intelligence Service uploaded the proposed areas into Local Insight so that they could quickly show the CCG what the areas were looking like. They also sent across background figures to the CCG around what the population is like, as well as showed them which services reside in the area.

Robbie says “this was really helpful as the CCG wanted to group the localities sensibly, so we could show them the underlying deprivation data, and make the case for how the localities should be defined based on levels of deprivation.”

He continues; “Long story short, it was a really good tool to be able to show them what we were thinking of in terms of geographies and for them to tell us their thoughts – it was a good mediating tool.”

Without Local Insight, a lot of this work would have been done manually – “it would have taken a long time, and involved lots of meetings with piles of paper. Whereas with Local Insight, they can just see it for themselves.”

A shared data platform

The final boundaries are now loaded into Local Insight, and can be accessed at any time by the CCGs and Public Health teams. All of the data is regularly updated and the teams can explore the area and local needs on an ongoing basis.

So, is this the start of more evidence-based thinking for CCGs in Wirral? “Absolutely” says Robbie. “Local Insight has been a good tool to bridge the two teams between Council and CCG, to get them working together and to get things started as well.”

Take a look at the localities for yourself on Wirral’s public site by clicking on the Areas icon on the left hand side and scrolling down to I) Place-Based Care Localities.

Find out more

If you would like to see how Local Insight could save you time, support partnership working and make sharing information easier – sign up a for a free trial of Local Insight.

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