Supporting Elective Care Recovery programmes by creating collaborative and integrated interventions using a workforce resource solution to solve administration and patient contact challenges faced within the NHS healthcare systems.
Challenge
Within the Elective Care Recovery programmes, NHS Acute Trusts have challenges recruiting and retaining experienced Referral to Treatment (RTT) validators to work within their sites. Waiting list validation helps NHS Acute Trusts understand the real demand for a service. Technical validation is defined as the administrative review of patient records to check where patients may have been treated and not been removed, and where diagnostics have been undertaken but the record not updated. This allows the Trusts to more accurately prioritise and deploy their resources in delivering patient care.
What we did
Working in partnership with NHS England South West Elective Care Team, our Care Navigation Services (CNS) team piloted an off-site, remote workforce solution to check and validate waiting lists, enabling providers to have a clear view of real demand and contributing to Elective Care recovery plans. The Trusts participating within the pilot were:
• University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust
• North Bristol NHS Trust
• University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust
We worked closely together with the participating Trusts to train CNS agents on the Trusts own local systems to validate and correct waiting lists with a high degree of accuracy, helping to reduce risk and provide a clearer operational view. The team established clear communications channels and provided timely and clear reporting including quality assurance of checks undertaken.
Following the end of the pilot all three Trusts extended to a business as usual delivery model, where we continued to provide remote support to the RTT validation pathways.
In addition, we are currently working with Great Western NHS Foundation Trust and Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust on short-term bespoke projects to increase capacity to support their validation of RTT pathways,
Activity
Elective Care
Partnership working to aid Elective Care recovery programmes
Workforce
Providing a remote and off-site capacity capability
Care Navigation Service
Providing support to patients’ healthcare journey
Outcome
The overall pilot supported 60,000+ pathway reviews at 97% accuracy rating, with 14% Clock Stop Rate.
Benefits from the partnership:
• Improvement in the pace of technical validation of waiting lists closer to real time.
• Helped achieve reduced and effectively cleansed waiting lists that reflect actual demand in secondary care providers.
• Enabled appropriate clinical prioritisation of patients in accessing appropriate diagnosis and treatment in a timely way.
• Helped Trusts learn more about what drives the need for technical validation and to support changes in practice and processes to reduce the amount of technical validation required moving forward.
