Eight Ninths Ltd provides teams of specialist consultants to help our clients and customers achieve their aims and goals.
Transforming care
- We can help you develop transformation plans, strategies, market position statements and business cases – including, if required, all business intelligence, analytics and financial workings – to lay solid foundations for service transformation.
- We can programme manage complex transformation portfolios or programmes, working closely with your subject matter experts and change teams
- We can prepare workforce plans and clinical services or care service strategies to underpin your transformation programme.
Winning new business
We operate a full bid writing service. We can
- Quality assure bids or sections of bids written by our clients
- Programme manage complex bid developments from end to end
- Prepare full responses to pre-qualification questionnaires and invitations to tender, including all financial and clinical modelling, for submission on approval from the client
Case summary: For confidentiality reasons we don’t disclose the identify of our clients for whom we write bids but they include NHS organisations, private companies and voluntary and community sector organisations. We have a good bid-to-win rate (exact details available to prospective clients) especially when taking into account the fact that we do not chose the bids our clients ask us to write! Our bid writing covers everything from specialist diagnostics, through to APMS contracts, to community surgical specialities, to integrated care systems
Undertake safeguarding reviews
We now have capacity and capability to undertake safeguarding peer reviews and investigations for both adults and children, and our lead director is both extensively experienced in safeguarding and fully trained in Social Care Institute for Excellence methodology.
Resolve conflicts
We can help organisations tackle tensions, challenges and arguments.
- We conduct independent reviews of difficult issues, e.g., poorly performing contracts, toxic inter-personal relationships and ineffective decision-making
- We facilitate board and organisational development processes so that organisations can identify and agree future strategic goals
- We can facilitate and mediate between parties in disagreement using tried and tested conflict resolution methods
Case summary: we conducted an independent review of relationships between a GP federation, its shareholders and its commissioners. We helped all parties move on from long-standing blockages and challenges and the federation is now one of the best regarded and best performing in its region
Improve relationships
We help organisations develop better relationships between themselves in order to deliver better care and better value
- We can support the development of joint ventures, e.g., in clinical specialities or to establish new models of service delivery, from facilitating initial discussions through to moblisation of agreed JV structures
- We can prepare partnership agreements, alliance agreements and memoranda of understanding, working closely with each party through a managed process to obtain lasting, solid agreements
- We can help organisations describe the purposes and benefits of their joint work, and help them set out the means by which benefits and outcomes will be measured
Improve governance
- We can create governance frameworks to support clients to out in place effective governance between organisations (e.g., in prime vendor arrangements).
- We can review committee and stakeholder engagement systems to create optimal structues which make best use of people’s time, clearly separate governance from management, and which support the principles of good governance
- We can create terms of reference for groups, committees and programmes and help organisations or systems create effective governance for the management of individual projects through to complex multi-million pound businesses
How do we do this?
We have a team of expert consultants, from a range of professional backgrounds, most of whom have worked at board-level in an NHS organisation and/or have significant senior management experience in a local authority.
We produce high quality work at pace, and we pride ourselves on the relationships we build with our clients.
By the way, we are called Eight Ninths Ltd because eight ninths of an iceberg is under the water’s surface. The point of our name is that we aim not just to work on surface ‘fixes’ but to help organisations create lasting, sustainable solutions that run deep.
We are a client-led company, in that we see serving the interests of our clients as our most important work. In so doing, we operate according to our own company values which are:
- Integrity and honesty
- Aiming to delight not to disappoint
- Fairness and openness
- Independence of thought and mind
- Respect for all people, and for the natural world