Urgent Health UK

Social Impact Statements

The Social Enterprise Mark criteria includes a requirement that the applicant can demonstrate that social and/or environmental objectives are being achieved.

In support of this, new applicants and renewing Mark holders are asked to respond to a set of social impact questions, which are designed to help them think about the social impact they create, and to articulate this clearly and succinctly.

Updated January 2018

1) What social differences and changes have you aimed to create (or supported)?

• Higher quality and safety of urgent primary healthcare services in the UK
• Optimum design of integrated urgent healthcare services in the UK
• Better cost efficiency of SE urgent primary healthcare services in the UK
• Solution to problems which put at risk the above services

2) What actions have you taken to address the above social aims?

• Quality audit and benchmarking of services provided by members.
• Provision of workshops and a conference providing education and training in a range of subjects leading to service improvement in member organisations.
• Provision of a purchasing consortium to allow members to buy goods and services more cost effectively
• Worked with NHS England and others on the technical specification for integrated urgent care services in England.
• Worked with NHS England, HMRC and others on issues which put service at risk. Highlighting the issues and helping to find a solution (eg clinical indemnity costs, HMRC IR35 issues)
• Highlighted issues in the media through press releases and interviews

3) What has changed and what benefits have been realised as a result of your actions?

• Ongoing smooth transition to a new integrated urgent care system for the benefit of the general public.
• Prevented the collapse of out-of-hours medical services by encouraging NHS England to fund first winter schemes and more recently to introduce state funded GP indemnity from 2019.
• Year on year reduction in service delivery costs by member organisations.

4) How do you and other people know your aims are being achieved? Or how will you know?

• Detailed data is collected nationally and locally on patient dispositions, patient satisfaction levels and adherence to service targets.
• We also monitor costs of delivering services in our sector through FOI requests to CCGs and we compare these in terms of value for money with both historic costs and with non SE sectors.
• We evaluate each of our workshops and our Annual Conference: the following provides evidence of the positive impact members experienced in attending:
• We report on our national achievements in our weekly news update email circulation list to members and in our quarterly newsletters.

Supplementary details

The below questions are not mandatory, but Mark holders are encouraged to answer them where possible, to provide a fuller account of their social outcomes and the social value they create.

5) How many people have benefitted from your actions?

The entire population of England has benefitted directly or indirectly from our work on integrated urgent care design and optimisation and our work to deal with issues which threaten service continuity.

Specific benefits are seen by our 25 member organisations which serve c. 40% of England and all of Wales.

6) What examples can you provide of a typical service user experience, that helps illustrate the benefits they have experienced as a result of your actions?

Difficult to do this as we operate at a very high level nationally.

7) What additional social benefits have you been able to deliver within your core services that distinguish you from other “for shareholder profit” providers?

• We don’t provide unpaid services.
• We minimise subscriptions and the surplus we generate to allow our members to plough more money into local services.