Five trusts outsource their back office in £20m deal

The joint venture company will provide integrated procurement, finance and accounting services for the next 10 years to Norfolk and Waveney integrated care system, in a model that combines purchasing and accounting systems.

NHS Shared Business Services managing director Erika Bannerman said it will be the first time an ICS’s back office services have been combined in this way.

The trusts involved are: James Paget University Hospitals Foundation Trust; Norfolk & Norwich University Hospitals FT; The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn FT; Norfolk Community Health and Care Trust, and Norfolk and Suffolk FT.

NHS SBS is a joint venture owned by the Department of Health and Social Care and French firm Sopra Steria.

The partners say the deal is in line with NHS England’s ambition to have ICSs integrate their corporate services to find efficiency savings.

They believe it will deliver £7.3m savings over the course of the agreement, reducing the back office spend from £27.8m to £20.5m over the 10 years. It will also provide more detail on areas of spending.

The contract will lead to staff being redeployed within the providers, or into NHS SBS.

Ms Bannerman said the contract was the culmination of 18 months of work bringing together the five trusts in the ICS and convincing them of the benefit that could be accrued from the service. This involved first agreeing a baseline of where the system and trusts’ corporate service spend was, before then moving on to demonstrate where savings and improvements could be found.

They used benchmarking tools from Future Focus Finance – the NHS’s national finance improvement programme – as well as NHSE’s procurement target operating model and a commercial framework devised by NHSE and the Government Commercial Function.

The work developing this service has also produced a diagnostic insight tool that can be used to replicate the process of benchmarking their corporate services and assessing where efficiencies can be found.