The West Yorkshire Combined Authority needed to modernise their IT infrastructure to prepare themselves for the expected 2020/21 devolution where they would join forces with other local authorities and become Mayoral Combined Authority. In addition to improving their capacity, security & resilience, their 500+ employees needed to move to flexible ways of working and had voiced frustration with their outdated tools in the annual staff surveys.

Caja were appointed to lead the Programme Delivery, support the development of their Digital Transformation Strategy and embed Organisational Change.

At a (virtual) all-staff event at the close of the programme, it was acknowledged by the senior leadership team that the Corporate Technology Programme has transformed the organisation.

The 2020 All-Staff survey confirmed the positive impact on employee engagement when 75% of employees agreed that they are now supported with the right tools and technologies to do their jobs - this was a fantastic 41-percentage point increase from the 34% agreement in 2019.

With the introduction of laptops and Microsoft365 there was also a significant shift to paperless working. This helped the client achieve their clean growth agenda as well as improving productivity and data protection.

Caja were thanked by the Senior Responsible Officer for their experience, knowledge and wise advice throughout and acknowledged for providing a programme and organisation push which was most definitely needed.

In 2013, King’s College Hospital NHSFT entered into a ten-year contract with Capita plc for the provision of transactional HR, Payroll and Pensions services. In 2019, the Trust and Capita engaged Caja to undertake a value for money assessment, as defined by the terms of the contract.

Caja used quantitative and qualitative techniques to review the performance of the service over the preceding six years, including:

The assessment concluded that the service afforded value for money, in the context of current performance standards and comparators with other services, where these were valid.

Caja identified a number of opportunities to improve the current service, enhancing end to end process value through investment in more effective use of technology, introduction of Manager Self Service, integration of systems, communications channel shift, improved data analytics and multi-channel, ongoing user engagement.

Crucially, Caja was also able to provide insight and guidance on industry best practice, including trends in automation of transactional HR services and the implications for a transformed operating model for the future service. Capita and the Trust accepted the recommendations and are working together to implement the findings.

1 in 2 people in the UK will experience cancer during their lifetime but around 4 in 10 UK Cancer cases are preventable, that’s more than 135,000 every year. Early diagnosis is vital to successful treatment with the NHS Long Term (LTP) 2019 setting out an ambition for 75% of cancer patients to be diagnosed at Stage I or II by 2028.

Caja was commissioned to provide consultancy support to business operations in designing behavioural science ‘nudges; to initially improve uptake for cervical and breast screening and to trial the approach with providers in primary care.

During the project, we supported South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Cancer Alliance raise awareness of behavioural science across their stakeholder groups and demonstrated how it can be used as a tool to support demand management and change management.

We constructed decision architectures for Cervical and Breast Cancer, highlighting the points where eligible women make choices that directly impacted screening uptake e.g. whether to book an appointment, to attend an appointment once booked etc. We then developed a set of hypotheses covering each of these decision points that could be addressed by applying behavioural ‘nudges’. The development of hypothesis was supported by detailed data analytics, demand forecasting and visualisations to develop ‘Behavioural Insights’ that layered NHS data and other data sources such as ONS population statistics.

We used our analysis to identify the PCNs where the implementation assets could make the greatest impact and operational improvement e.g. areas of socio-economic deprivation and lower screening uptake and the Cancer Alliance team engaged with a broad range of Practices to identify those most keen to trial the interventions with their patients. This resulted in a range of GP Practices as test sites - several actively testing the change interventions plus a ‘control’. Trials of the approach in primary care are starting to evidence a positive impact. As a result of the project the SYB Cancer Alliance has achieved:

At the time of project commencement, Tees Valley CCG reported a first dosage uptake rate of 81.2%, well below the nationwide aspirational target of 90%, set by NHS England. This relatively poor performance was largely driven by significant hesitancy amongst males in the 18-44 age range from the Middlesbrough area, with 38.6% of these individuals being unvaccinated.

Using our CogntivQI^TM Methodology we provided a number of research-informed recommendations to the client on ways to increase vaccination clinic attendance in the Middlesbrough area, with a specific focus on increasing first-dose vaccination rates amongst working age males. These included:

A breakdown of vaccinations in the Middlesbrough area by dose has provided a promising indication of the successfulness of our work to increase first-dose uptake with a near-10% increase in first-dose share compared to the national figures, with 22.25% of the recorded vaccinations being first doses. These data suggest that our approach successfully nudged individuals in Middlesbrough who had not yet been vaccinated to attend the advertised clinics over and above the standard communications being used across the rest of the country.