Client

Croydon Health Services

Duration

3 Months

Scope 

Following the successful establishment of a Trust-wide transformation programme, Hunter Healthcare Consulting were asked to support the Surgery Directorate with realising productivity and efficiency opportunities identified as part of the programme’s theatre transformation workstream.

The theatre transformation workstream successfully increased capped theatre utilisation by 8% to 81%, enabling CHS to overperform against its elective recovery targets. During the initial stages of this work, it became apparent that service demand and capacity work had not been undertaken across theatre and surgical service teams as part of planning for the 24/25 financial year. The Trust was not equipped to run theatres for 50 weeks per year without the need for temporary spend in critical services such as Anaesthetics and T&O.

Agreement was reached to carry out a baseline demand and capacity review of all surgical services, starting with the three services incurring the largest overspend against budgeted pay costs. These were Anaesthetics, T&O and Urology.

Service demand was analysed and mapped to clinical commitment requirements (DCC PAs) and grouped into activity delivery categories e.g. theatres, outpatients, on-call, ward rounds etc. Required DCC PAs were then compared to job planned activity across the department at Consultant level, identifying a significant mismatch between demand, the current allocation of DCC PA activities and overall medical team capacity in the departments.

Impact

-  Reduced medical pay budget overspend by £400k in the Anaesthetics department.

-  Successfully reset Anaesthetic department budgets to appropriately align them to service and patient demand.

-  Supported the Anaesthetic department with successfully developing a business case that reduced temporary staffing costs and budget overspend to a more appropriate medical establishment size, improving department resilience.

-  Identified opportunities to increase new patient capacity in T&O outpatient clinics by up to 33%.

-  Identified opportunities to improve emergency pathway cover in Urology to support Ward Rounds, Board Rounds and discharge planning.