First published in the book ‘Systems Thinking: From Heresy to Practice’ (O’Donovan in Zokaei et al 2010), this article presents a detailed case study of an adult social care service in an English Local Authority.
It explains how the Vanguard Method intervention helped re-focus the service on doing what matters to the end user right-first-time whilst at the same time removing procedures that were previously being used to screen people out of the system.
The case study reports 87 percent cost reduction: the average cost of administration went down from £998 to £134 per case. Moreover, 74 percent of the demand under the old design was failure demand whereas less than 10 percent of the demand under the new design (post intervention) was failure demand. The case study reports a ‘perceptible drop in the overall demand’ by more than 30%.
Read the case study here.