Corporate report

UKHSA Advisory Board: operationalising the UKHSA strategic plan

Updated 11 September 2023

Date: Wednesday 13 September 2023

Sponsor: Scott McPherson

Presenter: Sarah Fisher-Mackey

Purpose of the paper

The purpose of the paper is to:

• set out the next steps needed to support the implementation of the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) strategic plan
• share near-final proposals on 3-year outcome measures and metrics for measuring progress on UKHSA’s strategic priorities

Recommendations

The Advisory Board is asked to:

• note the plans for implementing the UKHSA strategic plan and ensuring strategic coherence
• comment on the role of strategic priority leads
• comment on the 3-year metrics for measuring progress on UKHSA’s strategic priorities (Annexe A)

Shaping and overseeing plans for the strategic priorities

UKHSA’s 3-year strategy, published on 18 July, sets out the 3-year direction and priorities for the organisation. Successful delivery of these priorities will rely on effective leadership and delivery at group level, as well as strategic leadership from the Executive Committee (ExCo), supported by effective business planning and performance management.

An ExCo-level strategic priority lead (SP lead) has been appointed by the Chief Executive of UKHSA for each priority. While responsibility for delivering the key activities within UKHSA’s business plan sits with group leads, SP leads will have a role providing strategic oversight and challenge across the agency, to ensure that UKHSA remains on track to achieve our strategic priorities.

Accountability for individual deliverables remains with the Executive Committee member who owns the relevant business plan though they will be expected to work with SP leads to understand the impact of changes to business plans on delivery of the strategic priorities.

The SP lead role falls into 3 main areas:

• strategic oversight; champion the vision set out in the UKHSA strategic plan, unblocking barriers to progress where necessary
• ensuring the right activities to deliver against our 3-year ambitions; agree high-level 3-year plans for achieving UKHSA’s ambitions for their strategic priority, calibrated to our funding settlement, and assure draft annual business plans
• monitoring progress; monitor progress across the strategic priority and report to the Executive Committee and the Advisory Board

A key lever for priority leads will be ensuring business planning is influenced by a clear 3-year view of what and how we will deliver against our strategic priorities. To enable this, priority leads will prepare high-level delivery plans or ‘roadmaps’ for the priorities. These will input to the 2024 to 2025 business planning cycle, to provide direction and support prioritisation decisions.

To ensure that we remain on track to deliver our strategic priorities, ExCo will review progress on each strategic priority on a quarterly basis. This would involve reviewing performance indicators and SP leads providing an update on overall progress. The Advisory Board would review progress 3 times a year, following the quarterly ExCo review cycle.

Development of metrics for the strategic priorities

At its last meeting, the Advisory Board discussed initial proposals for metrics and levels of ambition to measure progress on each of UKHSA’s strategic priorities over the 3 years of the strategic plan. Since then, the UKHSA strategy team have continued to work with colleagues across UKHSA to develop full details for these metrics, including the definitions and data sources needed for them to be implemented in practice. This has included consideration of how these metrics can best reflect health equality considerations.

Following feedback at the last Advisory Board meeting, we have changed the metric on the impact of UKHSA science (under the ‘Develop UKHSA as a high-performing agency’ strategic priority). We are now proposing to progress one of 2 potential metrics, which would measure this either through a stakeholder survey or expert analysis of case studies.

We have also proposed an additional metric under the ‘Improve action on public health through data and insight’ strategic priority, measuring the impact of the UKHSA data dashboard in enabling the wider system to deliver improved public health benefit. The dashboard will be established in September. Following this, colleagues plan to review the meta-data generated by the dashboard to determine, which would give the best metric for impact.

Where we do not yet have full details on what the metrics and levels of ambition should be, as they require additional time to develop, we have confirmed the plans and timescales by which metrics and levels of ambition will be available. This is the case for:

• metrics on antimicrobial resistance (as we need to align with the timetables for the development of a new cross-government action plan)
• climate and environmental change (where we are developing new metrics)
• stakeholder trust in UKHSA (where we plan to draw data from a new stakeholder survey, currently in development)

We would be grateful for any comments on the metrics and levels of ambition.

Aligning strategy development across UKHSA

The UKHSA strategy team has been working to understand and organise strategy development across UKHSA. We want to ensure that strategies are developed in a consistent way, with appropriate consideration, governance and planning to ensure alignment and maintain focus on delivering UKHSA’s strategic priorities.

To date, we have:

• taken steps to map the strategies under development
• agreed with ExCo the principles guiding when a strategy should be developed and the role of the strategy team in supporting teams to develop these strategies
• launched a UKHSA strategies forum to bring together teams developing strategies across the agency

The intention is for Strategy and Change Board (1 to:

• support management of interdependencies across supporting strategies
• contribute to alignment strategies around cross-cutting issues, for example people, commercial, health equity
• avoid a proliferation of strategies by agreeing a core set of strategies and rationalising strategies where appropriate
• reduce the governance burden on ExCo and support appropriate levels of clearance of supporting strategies
• ensure corporate buy-in to the strategies under development
• provide greater awareness across the executive team of strategy development work across the organisation, creating opportunities for more joined-up working
• ensure work remains focused on delivering UKHSA’s core priorities

The table in the annexe shows the strategies in discussion or development across the organisation. The UKHSA strategy team will map development of strategies, ensuring they underpin delivery of the UKHSA strategic plan, and advise if another approach may be sufficient, for example a delivery plan. The team will coordinate and utilise the UKHSA Strategies Forum to provide support to teams and ensure appropriate escalation and monitoring through Strategy and Change Board and ExCo, ensuring Strategic Priority Leads are sighted as necessary. All strategies in annex support delivery of UKHSA’s overall strategic direction including the strategic priorities.

Annexe: Supporting strategies pipeline August 2023

Title	Scope	Expected publication date	Internal or external publication
Science	Outlines the scientific assets, capabilities and ambitions of UKHSA, and its plan to protect the nation’s health from current and future health threats	Published to GOV.UK on 16 May 2023	External
Health Equity for Health Security	Sets out how UKHSA will target the people and places most at risk from external hazards to health in order to reduce avoidable harm and improve health security outcomes for all.	Published 27 June 2023	Internal
Security	Provides the vision and direction for a risk-based approach to security and enables the delivery of the mandated obligations within the HMG Security Policy Framework. It focuses on empowering UKHSA’s staff to ensure its operations, capabilities, information, research, assets, and people are protected.	September 2023	Internal
Data	Sets out a clear, consistent vision for data and its importance to achieving UKHSA’s objectives. It focuses on data capabilities used in driving operational decisions; scientific insights and secondary uses, including ethically approved research; how UKHSA will measure its capabilities and actions to improve data maturity.	September 2023	External
Technology	5-year strategy to ensure clarity of direction for technology which in turn enables the central business of UKHSA to be advanced. It will provide a solid foundation for technology across UKHSA, setting out how UKHSA intends to identify, design, develop, deploy, secure and run world-class IT services.	September 2023	Internal
Communications	Explains how UKHSA will use communication as a lever to build UKHSA’s reputation and help the organisation achieve its strategic priorities. This includes communications in response to incidents and emergencies, landing UKHSA’s brand with partners and the public, supporting the public to take actions to protect their health, and supporting UKHSA’s work to influence policy, practice, and partnerships.	September 2023	Internal
Global	Provides direction and outlines UKHSA’s role in the changing global health security landscape. It outlines global priorities in alignment with UKHSA’s national public health protection responsibilities and cross-government global health priorities.	October 2023	Internal
Commercial	Sets out the commercial actions needed to deliver UKHSA’s goals and strategic priorities covering: procuring, storing and distributing vaccines, strategic stockpiling, managing resilient supply chains, negotiating advanced purchase agreements, frameworks and scalable contracts, investing in infrastructure, and generating income from business partnerships to fund key capabilities.	November 2023	External
Pathogen Genomics	Sets out UKHSA’s ambitions to deliver world-leading pathogen genomics capabilities over the next 10 years. It will ensure a cohesive response across UKHSA pathogen genomics functions to deliver data that will improve clinical, scientific and operational outcomes in the health system.	Autumn 2023	To be confirmed
People	Outlines UKHSA’s strategy for developing its people and culture in order to support UKHSA’s development as a high-performing organisation and an excellent place to work.	Autumn 2023	To be confirmed
Clinical and Public Health Quality and Governance	Answers Framework Agreement requirement for UKHSA to have clinical governance arrangements in place, and the Government Internal Audit report and recommendations of October 2022. It will cover 3 years and set out a unifying framework for developing and assuring the quality of UKHSA services that impact directly or indirectly on the health of patient’s and the public.	November to December 2023	Internal
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)	The UK AMR National Action Plan 2024 to 2029 is the government-wide Action Plan that will include high level outcome and targets for surveillance and public health that will have country specific and organisation specific deliverables.	January to March 2024	External, published by central government
Customer Experience	Describes how to introduce and embed a user centred design approach and thinking across the organisation systematically and therefore increase user centricity across products or policy and services.	Autumn 2023	Internal

Points to note include:

• vaccines: successful delivery of the objectives will be managed through key documents (for example the science strategy) and the internal governance of the Vaccine Board led by Isabel Oliver
• operational excellence: there will not be a separate strategy and this will form part of the Delivery Plan for Strategic Priority 6
• strategic asset management plan: this mandatory plan for management of UKHSA estates assets will be carried out by estates team; not listed due to not meeting test for supporting strategy
• emergency preparedness, resilience and response (EPRR); there is a portfolio of work around EPRR that includes an operational framework of documents; therefore, a supporting strategy is not necessary
• sustainable development strategy; colleagues are submitting a proposal to ExCo on this and we will work with them in due course

References

1. The Strategy and Change Board provides strategic oversight of the development of UKHSA’s forward agenda, strategic direction, portfolio activity and major change, ensuring alignment to UKHSA’s vision, mission and objectives. It is accountable to the Executive Committee of UKHSA.