By Maddie Tudor on November 28, 2022
Budget planning season is upon us. Teams up and down the country will be reviewing and analysing previous wins and improvements to ensure crucial learnings are taken onboard. How do you plan to get the best value from your budget? How do you maximise outcomes whilst upholding patient care?
We recognise that it’s a challenging time right now. Given the current economic cost climate, now more than ever, every penny counts. At Spirit Health, we have worked with medicines optimisation teams UK-wide, helping them deliver cost efficiencies by maximising their budgets and identifying quick wins.
Top 5 tips
We’re sharing our top five tried and tested pointers to ensure you get the most out of your budget while continuing to deliver quality patient care.
1. Having time
Now is the right time to plan your budget effectively for next year. Setting aside time early allows you to investigate relevant cost-saving options, be that alternative medicines and devices, redistributing resources or tackling capacity shortages.
When it comes to budget planning, time is of the essence. Unfortunately, with our busy workloads, more often than not, the task of planning for the next year slowly slips down the priority list until it’s too late to ignore. Therefore, it’s essential to consider all the available options to ensure the fundamentals are upheld and aren’t overlooked.
Allocating plenty of time is the key to determining your workplan for budgeting success. 
2. Saving money
Achieving cost efficiencies is great for making your budget go further, but as we know, it shouldn’t compromise patient output and care.
Identifying quick wins enables you to make cost-efficiencies quickly and easily with minimal effort. This allows you to produce some wiggle room in the short-term within your budget so, you can focus on larger scale projects and objectives.
An added benefit to unlocking money opens the opportunity to upskill team members with specialised training and address key recruitment challenges.
3. Drilling down on the data
Analysing and drawing data insights are the foundation for identifying, planning and executing successful project rollouts. Medicines optimisation teams need to confidently rely on data to ensure the numbers stack up to achieve savings in the new year.
We’ve designed an online data analysis portal called Evalua. It’s designed explicitly for medicines optimisation teams as a starting point to underpin their decision-making processes and highlight areas where they can make improvements.
The visual and easy-to-navigate dashboards mean teams can easily drill down within population sizes, population health management and prescribing savings. Evalua lets you see other location performance so you can collaborate and share best practice on a national level – placing you on the best foot when it comes to planning for the new year.
4. Unlocking resource
Utilising and maximising your current resource capacity and sticking to one set of priorities, in theory, can ensure the effectiveness of your budget plan. In practice, however, this is hard to achieve and undertake.
This year, NHS England saw the transition from CCGs to ICSs, with the promise of unlocking more lived experience and resource availability to Place level teams. Whilst it may be a while until we see the full potential of the transition, we are still faced with mounting resource pressures and shortages.
Luckily, other options are available to get the best outcomes possible…
5. Prescribing audit
If you don’t have enough time, visibility on cost efficiencies, relevant data insights or capacity, then a free prescribing audit could be the key to making your budget go further.
Spirit’s free prescribing audit highlights areas where significant cost savings can be made and where quick wins can be won so you can maximise your budget.
To see how much you can save, book your free no-obligation prescribing audit with us. Did you know the process is handled remotely and is supplied to you over a three week period.
Maximise your budget and reveal your cost efficiencies ahead of the financial year. Book your free prescribing audit now; click here.
Approval Number: HEA4335NOV22
