Improving Scheduling, Resourcing and Patient Satisfaction at King’s College Hospital
King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust is one of London’s largest and busiest teaching Trusts, with a strong profile of local services primarily serving the boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark, Lewisham and Bromley. Their specialist services are available to patients across a wider catchment area, providing nationally and internationally recognised work in liver disease and transplantation, neurosciences, haemato-oncology and foetal medicine.
Kings College NHS Trust undertook an extensive review of clinical space usage and needs. Following this review, the Trust agreed that a solution should be implemented aimed at supporting and making the process of scheduling outpatient clinical space more efficient, eliminating manual and fragmented systems and processes which relied on the ‘knowledge’ of certain staff members.
Working with the service management team within the Department of Neurosciences a project was initiated to understand and implement a solution to address the intricacies and nuances affecting clinical outpatient scheduling. EventMAP reviewed the interdependencies with other Trust systems including the core ‘Patient Information Management system’, to set up a system with the ability to operate a ‘prioritised reserve list’ for regular clinics where there was currently insufficient clinical space to allocate clinics permanently to particular facilities. This set up the ability to allocate regular ‘adhoc’ clinics to the available space identified even at short notice.
The solution developed, specifically to supported the scheduling of Clinical Outpatient space, activities, with functions including the ability to ‘automatic cancel’ clinics, and release clinical space to be reassigned to clinics that require space (i.e. those on the prioritised clinics waiting list).
The provision of a comprehensive overview and reporting of all clinics schedules and displaying when clinics do not operate within a given period, space allocation, and clinic cancellation reporting, provided service and operational management teams with information to assist in optimising a clinic’s schedule over a longer planning cycle.
The solution enables the maximisation of patient appointments by the department of Neurosciences, with standardisation of administrative processes and elimination of manual repetitive tasks reducing errors, and substituting business rule driven automation. It makes the use of clinical space transparent enabling informed, evidence-based decisions and supports excellent scheduling and management which improves the patient experience.
The additional value and benefit of the solution includes:
These benefits not only support the Trust financially but also supports the delivery of key performance indicators, namely the 18-week waiting time threshold for appointments.
Over the course of the year we have been working with EventMAP to develop a solution to improve processes supporting the scheduling of Clinical Outpatient activities and resources. During this period EventMAP have taken the time to understand our needs, complexities and the challenges we face on a day to day basis.
