Coordinating care across hospitals, community services, local authorities, and private providers is resource-intensive, and even small inefficiencies can ripple into significant delays, costs, and staff frustration.
Smarter spending isn’t just about cutting costs, it’s about investing wisely to simplify processes, reduce duplication, enable transparency and free up staff time to focus on care rather than admin.
CHC teams operate in one of the NHS’s most complex environments. They manage assessments, funding decisions, care packages, and reviews for patients who often require ongoing, high-cost care, many of whom sit between NHS and social care responsibilities.
The process typically involves:
Without streamlined systems and aligned processes, staff spend hours chasing paperwork, repeating data entry, or reconciling mismatched records, all of which delay care and increase stress for patients, their families and professionals alike.
Too often, CHC teams are forced to work across disconnected systems: NHS EPRs, local authority records, commissioning tools, and provider systems. These silos create delays and duplication.
Smart investment in an end-to-end single digital platform allows staff to:
Investing in an end-to-end platform streamlines and consolidates each stage of the process, automating much of the administrative workload and enabling staff to focus more on their professional expertise rather than paperwork. This leads to faster assessments, clearer funding decisions, and better coordination across services.
Care packages commissioned through CHC often rely on external providers. However, different frameworks, pricing structures, and terms across regions or commissioning groups introduce unnecessary complexity.
By rationalising provider frameworks and aligning contract standards, the NHS can:
It also gives CHC teams more time to focus on patient needs rather than procurement logistics.
CHC teams spend a significant portion of their time on admin-heavy tasks like:
Low-cost automation tools or digital workflow platforms can remove much of this manual effort. Investing in tools that automate reminders, pull data from existing sources, and generate templated reports allows teams to focus on clinical judgment and family engagement, not formatting spreadsheets.
Finally, smarter spending means investing in performance tracking and feedback loops. By understanding:
…the NHS can make targeted changes and ensure continuous improvement.
These insights can also support better collaboration between ICBs, local authorities, and care providers, moving from reactive firefighting to proactive service delivery.
Continuing Healthcare may be one of the NHS’s more complex services, but it’s also a perfect case study in how smart, strategic spending can create simpler, more effective processes.
By investing in an end-to-end platform, streamlining contracts, automating administrative tasks, and using outsourcing strategically, CHC teams can spend less time navigating complex systems and more time providing the compassionate, coordinated care that patients need.
Given that every pound saved in CHC leads to more time for care; smarter processes and automation are essential.
