A 25 consultant department has average annual PA costs of £4 million (assuming 25 ftes).

The required annual hours of capacity to meet patient demand is 28,000 (167 PAs) but the department only has PA capacity in the job plans of 25,200 hours (150 PAs) - a capacity match of 90%. The cost of plugging this capacity gap (2,800 hours) with additional unplanned activity is £560k (at an average cost of £200 per hour of unplanned activity).

In addition, the same department has a productivity match of only 85%. This means that the department was expected to deliver 25,200 hours but it only delivered 21,420. The cost of plugging this performance gap with hours of unplanned additional activity of 3,780 is £756K.

The combined effect is a service alignment of 76.5% with a service delivery gap of 6,580 hours and an overall cost of £1.316 million (if the delivery gap is plugged entirely by unplanned additional activity).

In the following year, by implementing a service alignment improvement process the department improves both its capacity match by just 5% and its productivity match by 10%. The result is that service alignment improves to 90% and the delivery gap is reduced to 2,730 hours with a cost of unplanned additional activity of £546K. This is a saving of £770K on the prior year.