In a further sign of an increasing openness to outsourcing, NHS Suffolk has selected support services and IT/BPS giant Serco as its preferred supplier for a broad-ranging contract to provide local community health services. The £140m three-year deal is expected to start this autumn. Hot Views readers will remember that Serco also secured another NHS deal recently with the Anglia Support Partnership (see Serco in healthy shared services win).
This particular deal is more about delivering IT-enabled support services. Serco will TUPE over 1,000 staff from NHS Suffolk, and take on the responsibility for delivering community nursing, specialist nursing, management and operation of community hospitals, speech and language therapy, specialist children's services and community equipment services. Serco will work with a range of local delivery organisations in the NHS and third sector including South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (SEPT), and Bedford Community Dentistry.
Serco said that it will involve it ‘simplifying services and processes, and utilising new technologies to improve accessibility and address the rural needs of Suffolk’. The question we have is to what extent IT will be used to transform and manage the end-to-end process, versus addressing specific points in the service chain. This is an important question for both suppliers and clients looking to extract cost savings while also improving service delivery.
IT-enabled support services is a growing area of opportunity, particularly in the public sector, which we will be exploring in a forthcoming report for BusinessProcessViews.