Issue - meetings

This report provides an evaluation of the ‘First 100 Days’ of the Virgin Care contract, which started on April 1st 2017.

The YCYW Community Services Programme Lead introduced this item to the Select Committee. She stated they were confident that the process had gone well in the majority of areas. She said that Virgin Care are now operating under as business as usual state. She asked for the Select Committee to consider what future reporting process it would like to establish.

Jayne Carroll, Virgin Care highlighted some of the key issues that had been identified since the beginning of the contract.

Staff Pay

During the first pay run following the transfer in April Virgin Care reported that all 1,300 colleagues who had transferred were paid successfully with only a few issues raised.

During the May pay run the vast majority of colleagues received salary payments in full but a proportion of Virgin Care colleagues, those who received increments or who were undertaking additional, hourly-paid work experienced an issue with their pay. Virgin Care took immediate action to swiftly resolve these issues.

Virgin Care reports that the most recent pay run in June was successful and no further issues are anticipated.

Bank Staff

At the time of transfer it was not possible to migrate the Bank Solution from Sirona Care and Health to Virgin Care, it was recognised that there was a risk to both operational safety and agency costs on an ongoing basis.

Virgin Care undertook a proactive campaign to recruit bank staff and this has resulted in 250 members joining the bank and Virgin Care are undertaking a number of actions to support this; to continue the successful recruitment campaigns, to put in some additional resource to support bank allocation and additionally to implement a new IT software package for arranging and booking bank so staff find it easier to identify and post shifts they need to fill via bank.

Virtual Desktop and Network Roll Out

As part of its 100 day plan, Virgin Care has undertaken a complete replacement of the IT infrastructure used by the services they deliver. This project lays the foundations for the delivery of the new services and the transformation planned for the future, but was also driven by necessity as Virgin Care were only able to use the existing IT network for 100 days after transfer.

This large scale project required all devices and networking equipment to be replaced across 32 sites in Bath and North East Somerset by 1 July 2017 with all colleagues provided with new equipment and access details for both IT and telephony. 

As would be expected with any project of this scale, users reported some issues and these were logged and resolved or mitigated in line with the project plan. As the new system was rolled out to more users, the number of issues being raised increased but Virgin Care continued to mitigate and resolve issues so that services were able to continue to operate, making use of business continuity plans wherever necessary.

On 3 July 2017, Virgin Care took the precaution of enacting their Internal Major Incident Plan,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 26