Welcome. Today's assessment runs in three phases. Please open each tab only when your facilitator directs you to it. All materials are confidential to this session.
Work with the full cohort on the HealthBridge NHS Trust case study. You will complete a series of analysis tasks as a group. Your facilitator will manage timing.
You will move into smaller groups to work on a separate but related analysis task. Open the Breakout Task tab only when your facilitator directs you.
Return to the main room for a short individual interview. Questions may draw on the case study and your broader professional experience. There is nothing to prepare separately.
There are no perfect answers today. We are interested in how you think, how you communicate, and how you handle ambiguity. Engage genuinely with the scenarios.
HealthBridge NHS Trust — Patient Pathway Optimisation Programme (PPOP)
HealthBridge NHS Trust is a mid-sized NHS Foundation Trust serving a mixed urban and semi-rural population of approximately 480,000 people. It operates two acute hospitals, four community health hubs, and a recently acquired mental health partnership organisation, Meadowfield MHPS.
The Trust has received a mandate from the Integrated Care Board (ICB) to reduce outpatient waiting times by 18% within 12 months and to improve patient pathway visibility across all referral types. The Chief Operating Officer has commissioned a digital transformation programme — the Patient Pathway Optimisation Programme (PPOP) — to address this.
A Business Analyst has been assigned to lead requirements gathering and process improvement. You are that BA. It is your first week on the project.
Referrals from GPs, A&E, and internal departments arrive via three channels: NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS), a legacy fax-based workflow still used by some GP practices, and ad-hoc email from consultants. There is no single point of triage. Each specialty manages its own waiting list using a combination of a 15-year-old Patient Administration System (PAS), Excel spreadsheets maintained by admin staff, and in some cases handwritten registers.
The Meadowfield MHPS merger has added further complexity. Their referral processes are entirely separate and use a different system (RiO) with no current integration to the Trust's PAS.
Clinical directorate leads are broadly supportive of the programme but protective of their autonomy. The Cardiology department has already implemented its own workaround — a third-party web tool — without ICT approval. Admin teams are reportedly anxious about the programme's implications for their roles. The ICT department is under-resourced and managing three other concurrent programmes.
The Programme Director (PD) is a former NHS England national lead — highly experienced and well-connected, but not always available. The Deputy COO is technically the programme sponsor but defers heavily to the PD. There is an unspoken tension between the clinical informatics team and ICT over system ownership.
The ICB is conducting quarterly performance reviews. A national NHS Digital audit is scheduled in seven months. Data quality on the current PAS is poor — approximately 22% of referral records are incomplete or inaccurate.
Meadowfield's CEO, Dr Priya Soni, has expressed concern that the programme will marginalise mental health pathways in favour of acute care metrics. She has escalated informally to the ICB chair. Her clinical lead has not responded to three meeting requests from the PPOP team.
Work through the tasks below in order. Your facilitator will manage timing for each task. Capture your outputs in whatever format works best for your group.
Using the case study, identify the key stakeholders for the PPOP programme. For each, consider their role, level of influence, level of interest, and likely disposition toward the programme. Produce a stakeholder map or grid. Pay particular attention to stakeholders who share or have competing interests — who are the co-stakeholders in this programme?
What are the core business problems this programme needs to solve? Separate the symptoms from the root causes. Prioritise the top three problems you believe a BA should address first and be prepared to justify your reasoning.
Navigate to the Requirements tab. A project manager has handed you this set of requirements and said: "These came straight from the business — we need to adopt them as-is."
Review each requirement as a group. Identify what, if anything, is wrong with it. Categorise the type of flaw. Decide what action you would take. Be prepared to present your approach and how you would respond to the PM.
Using only the information in the case study, reconstruct the current referral intake process as best you can. Consider: who owns this process? What are the steps? Where are the likely pain points? What assumptions are you making, and how would you validate them?
The project manager has shared the following requirements and has asked the team to adopt them without change. Review each one carefully as a group.
Open this tab only when your facilitator directs you to the breakout rooms.
The following is a transcript from a BA analysis session conducted as part of the PPOP programme. The BA has brought together two process owners whose workflows are meant to connect:
Read the transcript carefully as a group, then complete the three tasks at the bottom of this page.
From the transcript, list every pain point you can identify. For each, note: what the pain point is, who is affected, and what the consequence is if it is not addressed.
Where are the gaps between Sandra's process and Marcus's process? What handoffs are missing, undefined, or simply assumed to be happening? What dependencies exist between PAS and RiO?
What did the BA do well in this session? What questions could they have asked that they didn't? If you were the BA, what would your immediate next steps be after this meeting?