What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to your chosen theme?

We, along with much of the NHS, have been using the same model for outpatient services for many years. As society and technology moves forward we need to adapt our services to meet the needs of our patients.

Our current Outpatient model is outdated and is not valuing patients’ time. Patients experience long waits for appointments, and sometimes these are unnecessary. This is even more apparent for follow-up consultations, however, although there are pockets of great practice we do not currently have the technology and processes in place at scale to allow patients to monitor and manage their own care at home.

We also aim to provide more patient services closer to home. We direct a high volume of patients into a hospital setting which presents challenges to our patients, including arranging transport, parking, time taken from their day to attend, and long waits to see the specialist. With the right support, some of these patients could be seen in a primary care setting closer to home

What does your project aim to achieve?

• This project will enable patients to understand and maintain their health at home before problems present. We will empower citizens with knowledge and education to be proactive with their health and the health of their loved ones.
• We will work with our Primary Care colleagues to understand the resources and education required to meet the growing demands of providing services ‘closer to home’
• Patients will be seen by the right specialist at the right time according to their clinical needs, facilitated by proactively gathering clinical information about our patients at the point of referral and using technology to assess patients changing needs whilst waiting.
• We will provide patients with robust support and easy access to specialists in the form of a ‘ticket-back’ system. This allows patients to manage their follow-up care at home with the confidence that they can return to hospital if any issues occur, without booking numerous unnecessary follow up appointments.

How will the project be delivered?

There is robust local support for delivering the Valuing Patients Time programme. We have executive sponsorship and a steering group led by the Head of Improvement & Transformation Ruth Jordan (Q Member), with additional support from an Improvement Programme Manager (myself) and Project Manager. We intend to work with and develop two test model departments; ENT & Gastroenterology, and have very proactive clinical and managerial engagement from these areas. This will enable us to carry out small scale tests of change, using comprehensive data to monitor success, and will also ensure we can identify and mitigate risks. Health Records and our Digital Transformation lead are fully involved in the project along with other corporate support areas to ensure all transformation activities are enabled and sustained. Throughout the project we will be developing lessons learnt and a toolkit to support spread to other departments using a value rather than costs based benefits approach.

What and how is your project going to share learning throughout?

This project has huge potential to generate valuable learning for both our Health Board and the wider NHS. Our approach will involve working closely with the Health Board Communications Team to disseminate progress and examples of best practice throughout the project. Our toolkit and lessons learnt will be available for sharing and we aim to present our learning at events and conferences. We have three Q members on our steering group and we will be sharing our progress through updates on Q Exchange, conversations at Q events as well as using Twitter as a communication tool