The whole point of developing a plan for the coming financial year is to resolve, at the outset, the tensions that are pulling your organisation in opposite directions.

So on the one hand you have demand to keep up with, and 18-week waiting times to sustain. On the other hand you have limited money, capacity and staff to do it with. Somehow your plan needs to reconcile those opposing forces.

What if it doesn’t?

Then the problem is effectively handed on for operational managers to resolve. They end up in meetings where the first half is about laying on costly extra capacity to clear the backlog that’s building up, and the second half is about how they need to slow down activity because they’re “over-performing” and the money’s running out.

That agenda, of course, doesn’t solve anything, so the problems fester. In the autumn, following a series of difficult meetings about demand management, some extra money is somehow identified to patch over some of the gaps. But everyone knows that nothing fundamental has really changed.

If life without a proper plan is so unappealing, why do so many NHS organisations begin the financial year without one?

Let’s try this scenario for size: The planning process begins in good time, but it quickly gets complicated. A lot of people need to be involved: general managers, finance, contracting, information, and that’s just from the hospital side. Different people approach the task in different ways, so there is a mix of methods and not all of them are valid. New assumptions are constantly thrown in to try and close the gap, and the model gets ever more complex. A planning analyst gamely tries to hold it all together in a spreadsheet, but it’s massive and people tire of looking at subsequent versions of it. The detail becomes unwieldy and time is running out. Something high-level has to be hammered out at the last minute, just to make the money balance. The detail is then retrofitted pro-rata and the “plan” signed-off.

In short, inclusive bottom-up planning is overwhelmed by complexity, and a top-down settlement has to be imposed instead. If complexity is the enemy, how could the process be simplified and streamlined, so that the bottom-up process can succeed?

Here is how Gooroo Planner solves the problem:

Firstly, we recognise that much of the data going in is a matter of simple historical record (recent activity levels, for instance). These facts can be agreed early on, and there is no need to discuss them further.

Secondly, we’ve taken all those complex calculations and developed them into a single model, based on principles that are widely-accepted across the NHS, fair to all sides, and transparent. So precious negotiating time is not taken up with detailed discussions about method. The calculations cover the whole of the planning period, and also break the plan down week by week so you can meet your objectives continuously through the seasons, and keep your plan up-to-date with events.

Thirdly, all the performance, demand and activity assumptions are laid out clearly and openly for discussion. Ultimately the key to reaching a settlement lies in successfully negotiating these assumptions, so that resources can be released from some areas to relieve pressures in others. So we’ve made it easy to test different scenarios, either item-by-item or by throwing in whole tables of alternatives.

Finally, we provide collaboration tools to get away from those giant emailed spreadsheets. Managed online collaboration means that participants can all see (and where necessary work on) the same plan, in real time, with full audit trails of any changes.

If you’d like to work that way, either to revise your plans for this year or start getting ready for next winter, then get in touch and we will be happy to visit and show you more. Just email [email protected] for a free on-site demo.