A Sussex NHS physio practice facing long waiting lists full of people with complex conditions – and staff feeling stuck on a hamster-wheel, feeling disconnected – decided to try a radical new approach. They organised a series of Community Appointment Day (CAD) events and successfully cut waiting times by a third.
“It was such a joy to watch, the buzz in the room was just amazing.”
Laura Finucane, physiotherapist, Clinical Director for Sussex MSK Partnership and the initiator of the Community Appointment Days.
All attendees had a guaranteed conversation with a Musculoskeletal (MSK) clinician, but were also directed to relevant support groups that were present ranging from large charities to small community groups, given access to wider health and well-being services, and even received immediate rehabilitation treatment.
One absolutely vital success factor was the decision to take a strengths-based and community-based approach. Laura Finucane and her team were very clear that the CADs could not simply be a more intense and speedy version of conventional medical consultations. They wanted to move ‘from a consultation to a conversation’.
In this online lunch and learn session we are pleased to be joined by Laura Finucane. She’ll share more on why and how they organised the CADs as well as the impact the initiative created and continues to create.
We’ll also hear from Adam Lent – Senior Consultant at The King’s Fund and former Chief Executive of New Local – about other health services trying similar innovations and how it might be possible to spread these strengths-based, community-oriented approaches. Adam worked on a piece about the CADs for New Local and interviewed Laura and her colleague Natalie Blunt. You can read the piece and watch the interview on the New Local website.
This session is organised and hosted by the Allied Health Professions in Quality Improvement network and Special Interest Group.
Our running order:
- 5 minutes | introduction from Jo Kitchen, convener of the AHP in QI network
- 10 minutes | presentation from Laura
- 10 minutes | presentation from Adam
- 30 minutes | conversation with Laura, led by Jo and Bianca Viegas (AHP convener in North East Hertfordshire), delving into the process and details of developing the CADs with Q&A from attendees.
- 5 minutes | round up and close
Laura Finucane
Laura Finucane is a consultant Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist and the Clinical Director for Sussex MSK Partnership in the UK. She is an Honorary Associate Professor at St George’s University London. Laura’s special interest is in serious pathologies of the spine and she has presented nationally and internationally on this subject. She has written a number of papers related to serious pathology and teaches at a postgraduate level.
More recently she has been involved in a global strategy to improve MSK health. The strategy recognises that if we want to improve people’s MSK and wider health, we need to do things differently. At a local level Laura has experimented in how we might deliver care that supports people with their MSK condition and beyond through the Community Appointment Days.
Adam Lent
Adam Lent is a Senior Consultant in the Leadership and Organisational Development Team at The King’s Fund. He has worked for the last twenty years on public sector innovation and public service reform with a particular focus on community-led approaches, new models of leadership and organisational culture change.
Prior to joining The King’s Fund he was Chief Executive of New Local for over seven years – a think-tank and peer-learning network seeking to deliver a community power vision for public services, society and the wider economy. He has worked previously as Head of Economics at the Trades Union Congress and Director of the Action and Research Centre for the Royal Society for the Arts. He has researched and written extensively throughout his career and he holds a PhD from Sheffield University.