Working with Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, we delivered a remote workforce solution to check and validate waiting lists, contributing to their elective care recovery plans.
Challenge
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 Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (GWH), our Care Navigation Services (CNS) team delivered an off-site, remote workforce solution to check and validate waiting lists, enabling GWH to have a clear view of real demand and contributing to their elective care recovery plans.
We worked closely together with the 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.
Activity
Care Navigation Service
Worked collaboratively with Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (GWH) to deliver a flexible and adaptable technical and administrative validation service, helping to reduce risk and provide a clearer operational view.
System transformation
Provided waiting list validation to help Trusts understand the real demand for a service contributing to their elective recovery plans
Workforce
Delivered an off-site, remote workforce solution to check and validate waiting lists and trained CNS agents on the Trusts' local systems to validate and correct waiting lists.
Impact
Over a three-month period, our team delivered 22,000+ pathway reviews at 97% accuracy rating, with 11% clock stop rate. Benefits from the delivery included supporting the pace of technical validation of waiting lists closer to real-time, helping GWH achieve effectively cleansed waiting lists that reflect actual demand and enabling appropriate clinical prioritisation of patients in accessing appropriate diagnosis and treatment in a timely way.
By the end of the project (4 February 2024), GWH had achieved:
- 82% Validation of 12-week waits (an increase of 66% since 12 November 2023) against national ambition of 90%
- 18% Non-validation of 12-week waits (a decrease of 66% since 12 November 2023) against national ambition of 90%
- 73% Validation of 26 weeks waits (an increase of 49% since 12 November 2023) against national ambition of 90%
- 27% Non-validation of 26-week waits (a decrease of 49% since 12 November 2023) against national ambition of 90%
This allowed the in-house team to focus on the patients at 52-week waits
DATA Source: Waiting List Minimum Data Set (WLMDS) Open pathways & ASI dataset
Please NOTE: ASI pathways are excluded from the data
