Productivity proposals often suggest that there  “significant opportunities” for savings to be made by reducing activity to the average. A report by the Kings Fund and the Centre for Mental Health has called for better community based services to cut unnecessary bed use in hospitals and psychiatric units, finding “widespread variation” in the use of inpatient care. Simulation can help test out what this means in your locality by modelling the interventions required to make these kind of reductions.

With the public health white paper out, and the Operating Framework outlining the role of Health and Wellbeing Boards, council-based teams will be well placed to provide GP commissioning consortia with information, evidence, needs assessment, and the quality improvement support they will need to commission high-quality, integrated health and social care services. Scenario Generator now contains social care prevalence data as well as health data and will be a useful tool for local authorities.

As debates about consortia size continue, scenarios can be modelled which test the impact of change on localities as well as larger communities. Scenario Generator can model localities and aggregate results to consider the wider impacts

Merging services is seen as one way of making efficiency gains. These initiatives are not limited to finance, information and other “back office” functions. Clinical support services like pharmacy and pathology also provide opportunities for mergers, with the greatest gains typically take advantage of the power of new technologies: for instance, to consolidate diagnostics for a wide geographical area. SIMUL8 was used to test mergers of pathology labs.

Prisoners in need of treatment at secure mental health hospitals often have to wait months for a bed, they are funded to be full at all times – so there is no spare capacity for patients, exacerbated by lack of placements to discharge to.
Simulation is a very visual way of showing that planning for 100% capacity ALWAYS creates waiting times

NHS commissioners could save more than £800m over the next decade by improving care pathways for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Download our COPD pathway from the library

A massive rise in the prevalence of dementia by 2030 will pose significant challenges to end of life care services in England as people want to die at home – a cheaper and better option. Model end of life care pathways in Scenario Generator, using the unassigned pathway