Northamptonshire, like many other health and social care systems, faced unprecedented pressure during winter 2017/18. In tackling the problems we found that our system escalation calls became disaggregated and focused on data and information gathering rather than identifying pressure points and best using available capacity.

In May 2018 we agreed to invest in a system tool which would enable us to improve the plan for the following winter, and the concept of Northamptonshire's real time health and social care capacity tool was born.