Principles and Concepts

A CAPA job plan is a capacity plan. It describes how much time a team member spends doing various things. For clinical contacts you can also calculate the amount of work they can do in this time. So it boils down to:

  • How much time are you spending on a certain activity?
  • And how many units of work (interventions, completed assessments) can you do in that time?

It’s a PACKING problem! You can think of it as packing fruit into crates. You remember in Core and Specific Partnership Work that we segmented the clinical pathways into fruit crates (Core and Specific Partnership).


The capacity of the Fruit Crates!

This is how much can and should you do?

To explain this it is best to come back to fruit and the packing of fruit crates. Although the idea of putting whole pieces of fruit into crates was hopefully clear it doesn’t actually represent the situation well enough for us do the maths. So now we need to refine some of the ideas…

These are that we don’t actually have crates for fruit but that we have thin trays where we will place slices of fruit. Each crate we have now divided into 13 trays. The 13 trays represent each week in a 3 month period.

The number of trays that we will use per piece of fruit depends on the number of slices we can get from that piece of fruit and the number of slices we can get in a tray.

Let’s take an orange: our current definition of a core partnership piece of fruit. For Tier 3 CAMHS purposes we are saying that it can be divided into 7 slices (7 appointments to complete treatment on average).

In each half day of Core Partnership work we can see 2 young people. So to translate we have a fruit tray (half day) that can take 2 slices of orange. We are PACKING fruit SLICES into clinical SEGMENTS.

Each orange thus needs 3.5 trays (7 slices divided by 2 = 3.5)


Partnership Multipliers

How many oranges can we pack into to our crate of stacked trays? We had 13 trays but only 11.25 are usable (due to leave).

The number of trays used depends on the fruit. Each orange uses up 3.5 fruit trays [each tray takes 2 slices and there are 7 slices to lay out]. So we can PACK three oranges, in all their slices, into the crate of trays.

So the Partnership multiplier is 3 for Core Partnership work. Each half day crate can take 3 oranges and thus we can start treating 3 young people and families in Core Partnership each 13-week quarter.


Specific Multipliers

Other pieces of fruit may produce more slices. A water melon might have 10 slices. This is a piece of fruit that is bigger and in our metaphor is representing Specific Partnership work that takes longer.

So in a segment of Specific Partnership capacity which has 11.25 trays in a quarter and can fit 2 slices per tray there are 22.5 “slice slots”. As a melon has 10 slices then the multiplier for the melon segment is 22.5/10 = 2.25.

So to work out how many new Specific Partnership interventions should start in a quarter multiply the time by the multiplier for that segment.

Practice Point:

Not all Specific Partnership segments necessarily need a multiplier. Always have one for the Core Partnership work as that will determine the flow of clients through your service the most but depending on what you do, it may be or not be helpful to have a multiplier for some or all of the Specific Partnerships segments (for instance if you want to demonstrate your capacity for types of work or clients for funding purposes).


A Capacity Plan is not fixed

This brings up a key point: this is a capacity plan not a diary. In other words only some of the activities in the above plan occur at set times.

A parenting group for example is likely to be at a particular time as it may require coordination with another agency – the local family centre – and the space has to be booked. However, other tasks just have the right amount of capacity allocated to them but the clinical work of that job plan segment can happen across the week as suits that clinician and their clients.


Forming a Job Capacity Plan

The above metaphor helped to explain how we segment the clinical work for a member of staff and their team. There are various other types of activity that complete a job capacity plan.

Clinical tasks

  • Choice
  • Core Partnership
  • Specific Partnership

Team activities

These would include

  • Team meetings
  • Supervision and supervising
  • Management meetings
  • Team away days
  • Organisation governance meetings
  • Plus travel and lunch.

A further segmentation is that of Other Tasks. These are non clinical activities. In fact pretty much anything that doesn’t fit the above! Examples could be

  • Time deployed to develop a clinical pathway
  • Coordinating a pathway trial
  • Professional meetings

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