Parallel create a one-stop-shop for estates data for Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB

Data intelligence and mapping company Parallel have been working with Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB to help compile information for their estates strategy. Read on to find out more…

When you’re writing an estates strategy, you need to compile a lot of information – statistics on all your buildings, plans, capacity estimates and much more. Bringing these together can be a lengthy job for just one building, not to mention the time it takes to find this information for an ICB’s entire estate.

Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB has been working with SHAPE to produce a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all of its estates needs, giving teams quick and convenient access to data at the touch of a button.

Phil Brenner, Strategic Estates Advisor to Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB, said:

“Given the importance of data-led decision making, we wanted to make a step-change in our processes of estates planning. We needed one central point to store all our data, and we knew SHAPE could help us with that.”

Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB serve a population of 1.13 million people, with the population expected to increase by 6% in the next 10 years. The population is aging, creating different health challenges, and the area contains some of the most deprived areas in England.

The ICB’s estates mission is to create a better utilised public estate which will drive efficiencies, and in turn enhance the experience for the communities they serve. They intend to do this by working together across provider boundaries to view their individual estates as part of a collective estate that is held and jointly reviewed, for the benefits of patients and staff.

With over 250 sites with multiple buildings on many of the sites in their administrative area, including 142 general practices with a total of 190 buildings, Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICB’s estate is extensive.

Information about the buildings and the estate was spread across a wide range of systems, with data being held in individual documents, in strategies, or on SHAPE, amongst others. The ICB wanted to bring this data together, and the perfect system to hold it would be SHAPE.

The SHAPE team’s first task was to establish exactly what the ICB wanted to achieve. Their objective was to use SHAPE as a central repository to house all data about their estate. That could be plans, notes and documents about the building, relevant estates strategies, images, number of rooms, capacity, facilities, and all other relevant files and statistics.

They wanted staff members to be able to click on a building on SHAPE and see all the data about that site, and required a fully auditable record of all changes that are made to each of the sites by authorised staff, including attaching new documents and editing current information.

We set the ICB estates team up with SHAPE Local, which enables an organisation to overlay their own datasets alongside the prepopulated national data, in a private, confidential workspace.

All estates data is available to them at the click of a mouse, from strategy documents such as overarching estates plans down to precise details like the number of car parking spaces, and the proportion of disabled spaces available at each site.

Andy Hadley, Head of Primary Care Estates and Digital Transformation at the ICB added:

“Now we’ve got our new SHAPE Local, everyone in our team can see data at a glance. It’s revolutionised the way we work, and means we can make decisions with confidence, knowing we’ve got all the facts available.”

The resulting system gives the ICB staff an integrated estates platform where they can find out everything they need, increasing efficiency, avoiding error and allowing rapid, reliable decision making.