What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can improvement be used to reduce delays accessing health and care services'?

Gynaecology waiting lists have increased by 60% across the UK since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. There are more than 550,000 women waiting for elective gynaecology across the UK, with over 25,000 waiting more than a year for care in England.

The solution to extensive gynaecology waiting lists is not the focus of this project – it is a much wider challenge needing multidisciplinary and multifactorial contributions.

The RCOG report “Left for Too Long” highlights the impact on women of waiting for care and that ‘immediate action must be taken to improve their experiences whilst waiting.’

This project aims to improve the experiences of those waiting for care by exploring active waiting within a gynaecology context. This connects with the Q Exchange theme by focussing on ‘Improving the way waiting lists are prioritised and managed and supporting patients to wait better.’

What does your project aim to achieve?

The aim of this project is to coproduce evidence-based, active waiting resources to improve the experience and outcomes of those enduring lengthy waits for gynaecology care.

Key objectives:

• Identify evidence from women’s health literature on components and successful drivers of active waiting that improve patient experience
• Explore what is helpful and desired in terms of support for women and people during a prolonged wait following referral – hearing directly from those with lived experience
• Coproduce an ‘active waiting’ offering with women currently or recently on a waiting list

Benefits:

• Production of resources explicitly for use by women waiting for gynaecology care – incorporating lived experience voices from the outset, helping make the resources as accessible, appropriate and useful as possible
• Ability of NHS services to offer an evidence-based support package to patients who are facing long waits for gynaecology care, thereby improving their experience and outcomes

How will the project be delivered?

This project proposes to conduct an evidence review on patient experience and impact of waiting, active waiting list management and successful support offerings during waiting, specific to women’s health.

Following this, an iterative codesign approach will be used, combining the knowledge outputs of the evidence review and the lived knowledge and experience of those waiting, to develop an active waiting ‘offering’ to support women and people experiencing a prolonged wait following referral. This could be a physical output/product e.g. leaflet; could be a recommended action plan for next steps/service provision; could be a suite of support offerings e.g leaflet + animation + infographic + signposting support poster. This ‘offering’ will then be professionally designed and presented to the project group as a candidate intervention.

How is your project going to share learning?

Waiting list management is a challenge across health and social care services. The learning from this project has potential to be useful within other care contexts, both in terms of methodology for replication and for the content of the resources.

The results and learning from this project will be shared with the Q community via the Q Exchange website. As well as this, we will share the plans and results with Members and Fellows of the RCOG via liaison with the College Communications team – this will be via regular membership newsletters as well as the utilisation of social media platforms.  We will also work with the RCOG’s Women’s Network and other third sector organisations with an interest in women’s health to disseminate the results, ensuring women using gynaecology services across the UK are able to access the project outputs. For wider dissemination, we will present at relevant national improvement conferences/events.