Reducing an outpatient waiting list using a pre-existing culture of improvement and innovation

NHS Forth Valley’s Neurology Unit came together early in the COVID-19 pandemic to redesign their service using Realistic Medicine principles. They were not affiliated with a formal improvement programme, but utilised their existing enthusiasm for improvement and innovation to effectively improve their service. A scoping exercise focused on TrakCare data indicated that Active Clinical Referral Triage (ACRT) and waiting list validation processes could help remedy long patient waits and waiting lists. This led to the development and testing of several successful change ideas. Read more about this project here.

Using data to prioritise remobilisation: identifying your ‘missed’ referrals and health ‘debt’

After the initial surge of COVID-19 in 2020, NHS Grampian set out to identify which elective care services could be remobilised while keeping clinical risk to a minimum. Services were asked to consider 11 key principles of remobilisation and conduct a thorough risk assessment in order to determine their readiness to remobilise. Then, data dashboards were used to assess the size of outpatient and inpatient waiting lists, length of wait times relative to their ‘treatment time guarantees’ (TTG) targets, and number of outpatient appointments attended. These steps enabled NHS Grampian to plan their capacity and ensure they could deliver the most urgent treatment as quickly as possible. Read more about their experience in this case study.