NHS Trust review and reforms: What does it mean for finance teams?

Recently, it was revealed that sweeping review of NHS trusts and a new pay framework will be published in April. The reforms will be focusing on ‘better management’. Unfortunately, the results may be revealed in league tables, and nobody wants to be at the bottom.

What does this mean for you?

According to this BBC report, ‘Top performers will be given more capital and greater control over where to invest it.’ But what about those ranked nearer the bottom? It was revealed that ‘turnaround teams’ would be sent to assist struggling trusts, and senior leaders could be denied pay rises if their trust does not improve.

One of the aspects being ranked is finances, and therefore it may become a more pressing priority for NHS finance leaders to deliver high productivity and efficient spending.

What can NHS finance managers do?

With many NHS trusts already struggling with budget constraints, low staffing levels and tough efficiency measures, you may wonder: What more there is to be done?

Enhancing working capital

At the end of the day, capital is the key to ensuring your trust can pay staff and procure essential goods for patient care. Therefore, if you maximise that working capital, you can do more.

While it may be apt to look to your purchasing to ensure you are being cost effective, another fantastic place to look is in accounts payable.

Stricter controls on payables risks

Whether from human error, fraudsters, or technological issues, payables can be fraught with error. So tightening your risk controls and being strict on following process can make all the difference to ensuring optimum levels of working capital.

From years of experience, we’ve found that a good place to look for more cash is in overpayments. As a testament to that, just last year we prevented £250m in duplicate payments from leaving our customers’ accounts. It’s a simple equation. The fewer overpayments you have, the less is paid out, the more cash you keep available for buying essential goods and paying staff. In preventing overpayments, recovery also is not needed, which again saves money and allows time to be spent on more productive endeavours.

Higher efficiency with AP automation

The key to preventing overpayments in an effective way lies in automation. While your team may not have the time to manually check every invoice for duplication, error or fraud risk, technology can. We recommend not simply relying on add-ons in your ERP, which can often not be effective at capturing every instance. Instead, opt for a specialist piece of software that has been designed to interrogate the data thoroughly, and in multiple ways. This gives you your best change at finding every duplicate invoice, and many other risks besides.