25% productivity boost for major healthcare provider
10th April 2026 | 2 min read
The Challenge
An NHS Foundation Trust faced the mounting pressure to deliver high-quality clinical services while meeting the rigorous Quality, Innovation, Productivity, and Prevention (QIPP) challenge. This is a large-scale, rigorous initiative introduced in the NHS to improve the quality of care while simultaneously achieving significant efficiency savings.
The primary hurdle was achieving exceptional operational performance and “Best Care” within a constrained financial environment. Existing processes needed a radical transformation to eliminate waste and exceed patient expectations. However, the Trust required a sustainable model that moved beyond short-term fixes to create a lasting culture of excellence and employee-led innovation across its diverse hospital sites.
The Solution
Partnering with Unipart, the Trust launched the ‘Achieving Best Care’ (ABC) programme, an approach rooted in performance through engagement. Unipart acted as an industrial partner, applying over 20 years of real-world operational experience to the healthcare environment.
The solution focused on capability development, equipping front-line staff with Lean tools to identify and sustain improvements themselves. The team established over 40 Communication Cells, Unipart’s Communication Cells are digital or physical, standardised, daily operational meeting hubs used to manage performance and improve processes.
By addressing underlying process gaps, the programme ensured knowledge was transferred directly to employees, fostering a permanent culture of continuous improvement and local ownership.
The Impact
The partnership delivered quantifiable and sustainable results across the Trust. Key achievements included:
- Increased theatre capacity within Orthopaedic Division by c30%, representing real opportunities to increase income or reduce cost
- 25% improvement in productivity in outpatients administrative teams enabling significant annually recurrent financial savings, with realisable savings in year one
- 50% reduction in time to hire with a 33% reduction in management time spent recruiting
- Greater management consistency and capability across the Trust
- Improved communication stemming from the introduction of more than 40 team Communication Cells established across the Trust, from Theatres to HR and Wards to Finance
- Enhanced levels of employee engagement across areas of implementation.
By embedding these new behaviours, the Trust secured improvements that continue long after the initial Unipart engagement.
To build a sustainable capability culture and achieve real-world results, contact us here.