NHS Improvement said in February it had commenced its review into community and mental health Trusts, ‘building on the approach of the Carter Report on operational productivity and performance in NHS acute hospitals’.
The organisation said: “As Lord Carter was finalising his report, he was contacted by many community and mental health Trusts keen to be involved in a similar detailed approach. In his role as a non-executive director at NHS Improvement, he is overseeing and steering our review. He intends following a similar structure and methodology to that utilised in his original acute Trust review, with some significant tailoring to community and mental health.” Among the review’s aims will be to identify:
- How organisations in mental health and community Trusts operate.
- ‘What good looks like’.
- ‘What approaches to improving productivity and efficiency are already in place, and the opportunities to drive these further’.
- ‘What metrics and indicators are required to support the development of the model for these sectors’.
NHS Improvement has set up a ‘cohort’ of 23 community and mental health Trusts with which more detailed engagement will be focused initially, and is ‘looking at the scope to extend the review to all remaining providers’.
It said: “As our understanding develops, we will feed this into discussions with Trusts, to enable us to jointly scope, iterate, and finalise, the findings of the review, and specify the benchmarking criteria for an ‘optimal model’ NHS community or mental healthcare Trust.
“We will also be doing some Board-level engagement throughout the review, and discussing our findings with all organisations before they are published this autumn.”