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Enabling patient care by managing information, people, processes and technology effectively within family health services.
Finance & Procurement
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We develop and provide administrative, procurement and financial services
Estates & Facilities
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Management of all primary care premises and the facilities within them.
Information Technology
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Support, maintainance and development of the IT infrastructure for the NHS in Birmingham

Introduction

The Birmingham Primary Care Shared Services Agency (BPCSSA) is hosted by NHS Birmingham East and North and came into being in April 2002. The main purpose of creating a Shared Service Agency (SSA) was to focus on core non-clinical services that are common and essential to all our PCT clients. The organisation aims to encourage and promote:

  • Efficiency, by enabling increased economies of scale and through avoiding duplication of services.
  • Expertise, reducing city-wide competition for scarce resources and through building areas of expertise that the PCTs can draw upon.
  • Partnership, through encouraging and enabling the Birmingham PCTs to work together and share knowledge.
  • Focus, through the SSA concentrating solely on improving non-clinical support services whilst the PCTs concentrate solely on improving patient care.

Increased Efficiency & Greater Expertise

The BPCSSA provides key specialist supporting services which would be too expensive for individual PCTs to maintain and would not provide the same depths of specialism. By providing the same services accross PCTs the BPCSSA also becomes more efficient through increased economies of scale and reduced duplication.

In the same way that the BPCSSA enables the PCTs to focus on patient care the BPCSSA can also increase it's expertise in specialised functions. This results in a greater depth of skills which can be employed at key targeted areas.

Promoting Partnership & Focusing on Patient Care

Wherever possible, the BPCSSA aims to encourage PCTs to work together to share their valueable knowledge and experiences. The BPCSSA intentionally seeks to identify and drive valuable initiatives that can be beneficially implemented across all PCTs through utilising its' specialist resources and expertise in order to support the PCTs in improving patient care.

Our Clients

The primary stakeholder clients of the BPCSSA are the three Birmingham PCTs and Community Health Trust:

  • NHS Birmingham East and North
  • Heart of Birmingham teaching PCT
  • NHS South Birmingham
  • South Birmingham Community Health

However the agency also provides support to:

  • NHS West Midlands
  • Solihull Primary Care Trust
  • Good Hope Hospital

Each client has very complex service needs which have many similarilarities but also many distinct differences. The BPCSSA necessarily has to to meet all its client's needs simultaneously, whilst ensuring a balance is met through which all clients gets an equally good level of service. Obviously, this is no easy task!

The BPCSSA aims to achieve this through the continued development and improvement of a 'customer service culture'. Increasingly performance and quality standards are being introduced through which the agency becomes accountable for meeting its objectives and improving its service deliveries.

Accountability

The BPCSSA is acccountable to clients through a Stakeholder Agreement between the parties (established in 2002) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which are reviewed annually in regard to service provisions made by each directorate.

For more information or a copy of these SLAs please contact the relevant BPCSSA directorate.