Case Studies

St Andrew’s Healthcare

St Andrew’s Healthcare

St Andrew’s Healthcare banner image

Context and approach

St Andrew’s Healthcare is a charity providing specialist mental healthcare for patients with some of the most complex, challenging mental health needs in the UK. It provides care across a number of services, including Men’s Mental Health, Women’s Mental Health, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), Neuropsychiatry, Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Learning Disability, with the majority of its 750 patients referred via the National Health Service.

They contacted Niche to assist them develop a demand and capacity model of their services over the next 5 years to assess their future strategic direction and associated service offer. They had a very clear strategic ambition to develop more community focused services delivering innovative offers across all care groups. This was partly a response to the emerging Provider Collaborative developments in the NHS and the desire to treat patients closer to home.

What we found

We undertook a significant process of engagement across senior clinical and operational leaders, and their commercial team. This was enabled by a number of workshops that established the baseline position for them, options for change and a revised set of strategic targets across services. We developed a very complex capacity and demand model based on a baseline over the next 5 years and possible scenarios of change. This was supplemented by estates and financial projections including detailed cash flow forecasts. As the work was developed in a highly changing market the options appraisal aspect of the work looked at possible cases for how the market would be developing over the next 5 years and how St. Andrew’s should respond in each case.

The work led to the agreement of a commercial strategy with an intertwined set of recommendations for the continued development of St. Andrew’s. We also agreed a set of ‘supporting strategic imperatives’ and ‘underpinning operational imperatives’ for them to take forward.

All of the recommendations were fully accepted.

What our clients say

I have used Niche on multiple occasions, in my view, they are the go-to experts in their field. They are connected, knowledgeable, and honest. Their analysis is spot on and has on more than one occasion come to fruition exactly as they predicted it would

Jess Lievesley - Interim Chief Executive Officer

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