The Outpatient Capacity Team (launched in February 2016) has been recently formed from members of staff who previously worked in isolation within divisions and their roles are to ensure outpatient capacity meets demand and is fully utilised.

In April 2015 Outpatient Services moved under the umbrella of the FSS Division which provided an opportunity for these staff members to join forces and review operational practices whilst continuing to work closely with consultants, nursing staff, colleagues within divisions and the appointment centre to manage waiting lists, ASI’s and any urgent capacity issues.

A continual challenge within outpatients is wasted appointment slots due to DNA’s, patient cancellations and unbooked slots, the team are now able to continually monitor clinics using a booking tool which updates every 10 minutes and alerts the team to any vacant slots allowing them to be filled with patients from the ASI/Waiting list. The benefits to patient experience will ultimately be reduced wait time for appointments which has also been a theme from our Family & Friends comments.   

 Business Manager for FSS, Emma Povey, stated, “During a recent pilot within Gastroenterology & General Surgery (over a 2 week period in February) we saw clinic utilisation improve by 4% taking us up to 96%, unfortunately we were unable to reach our goal of 100% due to patient cancellations with less than 24 hour notice but we are definitely moving in the right direction”. 

In conjunction with the work carried out by Health Informatics to provide robust outpatient data on the knowledge portal and also creating the booking tool the aim for the team over the coming months is to provide divisions with future demand predictions allowing the opportunity for capacity to be planned in advance avoiding the need for some patients to be placed onto waiting lists.